NEW YORK.- A major exhibition opens at the Whitney in November will survey the art of Lucas Samaras (b.1936), examining in depth the central preoccupation of his artistic production: the self-portrait. Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras, will explore the manifold ways in which the artist has used his own image to investigate themes of sexuality, terror, mortality, and transformation, while inventing new techniques and experimenting with unconventional materials. Organized by Marla Prather, curator of postwar art, the exhibition will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through February 8, 2004. 

Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras will trace Samaras’ use of the self-portrait in drawings, photographs, sculptures, mirrored environments, and film. With more than 350 works , it will be the artist’s first major exhibition in an American museum in 15 years and the first in New York since a Whitney survey in 1972. 

“Judged as a whole, the oeuvre is staggering in terms of its sheer volume and dazzling in its degree of formal and thematic invention," said Marla Prather, the Whitney’s postwar curator and organizer of the show. "Although artistic precedents exist from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, from Max Beckmann to Frida Kahlo, there is arguably no artist in history who has so consistently and unabashedly exploited his own face and body for his art.”  

Maxwell L. Anderson, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, noted, “The Whitney has long championed the art of Lucas Samaras. The museum organized his first retrospective 30 years ago, and now maintains the largest repository of his work in a public institution. In the last three decades Samaras has built remarkably on his past innovations and produced some of his most important work, including the large body of photographs for which he is best known.” 

Lucas Samaras was born in Macedonia, Greece, in 1936. Growing up during World War II and the ensuing Greek Civil War, he was deeply affected by the destruction and devastation he witnessed—his home was damaged and his grandmother and aunt were killed. In 1948 Samaras moved with his mother to West New York, New Jersey, where they joined his father, who had left Greece in 1939. Samaras studied art at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and art history at Columbia University in New York City. At Rutgers, he encountered Allan Kaprow, George Segal, Robert Whitman, and other groundbreaking artists engaged in a radical form of performance art, or "Happenings," an experience that encouraged Samaras’ abiding interest in theater. In 1959 he studied at Columbia with the distinguished art historian Meyer Schapiro. Samaras’ mature career as an artist began in the late 1950s. He began showing his work consistently in the early 1960s. In 1964, he moved permanently to Manhattan. 

The Whitney show will include key selections from the large number of drawings Samaras has made throughout his career, works that demonstrate his facility for creating with pastel, colored pencil, ink, graphite, and cutout paper. An unusually prolific draftsman, he often composes daily variations on a theme--such as the 1982 series of colored pencil drawings of his bearded face--over a period of several months. Among Samaras’ most familiar creations are the mixed media boxes (often containing self-portraits) that he made between 1960 and the late 1980s. The boxes may be colorfully painted or encrusted with fake gems or yarn and filled with mundane and exotic objects--beads, pins, shells, mirrors, stuffed birds. These self-referential ingredients, housed within tiny compartments or hidden drawers, are magically combined to yield some of the artist’s most formally and psychologically complex inventions.  

Samaras’ important contributions in the field of photography will be highlighted through in-depth presentations of his Polaroid photographs, including the AutoPolaroids (1969-71), PhotoTransformations (1973-76), Sittings and Still Lifes (1978-81), and Panoramas (1983-1990), as well as later photography from the 1990s. These self-images range from deceptively simple portrayals to elaborately staged productions involving backdrops, familiar props, and elaborate lighting, all meticulously arranged within the confines of the artist’s studio. The artist assumes multiple identities in these works through contorted or provocative poses and elaborate gestures. He further enhances the imagery, as in the PhotoTransformations, by physically manipulating the pictures’ surface emulsions, or obscuring and embellishing portions of the image with hand-applied ink. His body, beneath richly colored lighting, is melted, dismembered, flayed, ignited, and spliced. These violent bodily distortions may convey hallucinatory moments of ecstasy, self-destruction, and anguish. The solo performances of the AutoPolaroids or PhotoTransformations conveniently eliminated the need for a model. In the Sittings (1978-80), however, Samaras photographed his friends and acquaintances nude before theatrically lit backdrops, though he is still invariably present, seated in the darkness alongside the sitter and looking directly at his lens.  

"Professional self-investigation--which is what a good self portrait is--is as noble a search as any other," Samaras has said, "and I have always shared what I have learned about myself with the public." Provocative and often confrontational, Samaras’ self-depictions are motivated by a profound narcissism, for which the artist makes no apology. At the same time, his willingness to repeatedly divulge his "surface self" emerges as a generous and trusting artistic gesture. The broadly diverse results can be romantic or violent, convulsive or gentle, hilarious or terrifying.

The Whitney has a continued commitment to Samaras; its holdings of Samaras’ work are the most extensive of any public collection, including a total of 114 objects--sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Of this group, approximately 50 will be included in the show. The Whitney organized the artist’s first major survey in 1972, and has included his work in 48 shows over some 40 years. Four large exhibitions have been held elsewhere: at the Denver Art Museum in 1981 (pastel drawings), the Polaroid International Collection in 1983 (Polaroid photos), the Denver Art Museum in 1988 (a traveling retrospective), and the Yokohama Museum of Art in 1991, a retrospective that traveled to Hiroshima. 

Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras has been made possible by support from The J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, Anne and Joel S. Ehrenkranz and the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Catalogue - The Whitney’s exhibition catalogue, with more than 400 color images, will include an extensive biography of the artist and an essay by Donald Kuspit exploring the phenomenon of self-portraiture in Samaras’ work.