“Lucas Samaras: Master of the Uncanny”: The Intermission Gallery Hosts a Retrospective of the Greek-American Artist

The Intermission and Pace Gallery announce their collaboration on a retrospective exhibition of Greek-American artist Lucas Samaras, titled Lucas Samaras: Master of the Uncanny, opening on September 25 at The Intermission in Piraeus.

Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in his birthplace in twenty years, the show brings together works that span Samaras’s wide-ranging and multifaceted practice.

Lucas Samaras
Born in Kastoria in 1936, Samaras emigrated to the United States in 1948, where he developed a pioneering body of work encompassing sculpture, photography, painting, digital media, and wearable art. His practice deeply explored identity, memory, and transformation, often using his own body as subject—an interest partly shaped by his involvement in the “Happenings,” a hybrid art form combining installations, performance, and other media that emerged on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A central figure of the city’s mid-20th-century avant-garde, Samaras embraced an interdisciplinary approach to chart a singular path.
Over the following decades, his work resisted easy categorization, moving fluidly from figurative pastel compositions and the iconic Boxes to mirrored rooms, Polaroid self-portraits, psychedelic paintings, and groundbreaking digital works.

The Intermission exhibition features works created between the 1960s and 2010s, including rarely exhibited jewelry-sculptures. Highlights include manipulated photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s –Auto Polaroids and Photo-Transformations, alongside vividly colored Mosaic Paintings, fabric Reconstructions, and pastel works on paper. The presentation also includes sculptures and pieces from the Box series, as well as other “transformed” utilitarian objects.

Lucas Samaras, Mosaic Painting #6, March 30, 1991 | acrylic on canvas board | 44″ x 31-1/4″ (111.8 cm x 79.4 cm) | Painting No. 21806 | © Damian Griffiths

Between 1996 and 1998, Samaras created a series of jewelry-sculptures, several of which will be featured in the exhibition. He shaped and painted chicken wire, later casting it in solid 22-karat gold, juxtaposing the humble wire with the historical weight of gold. These wearable works, simultaneously ornamental and austere, conform to the body while remaining visually striking, imposing, and heavy. They reflect Samaras’s long-standing engagement with sensory experience, transformation, and the charged space between object and viewer.

Following Samaras’s passing in March 2024, Dia Beacon in New York presented a major long-term exhibition dedicated to the artist, opening in September 2024. This was the last exhibition in which he actively participated and featured the Cubes and Trapezoids series, donated to Dia in 2013 and shown for the first time since their 1994 debut at Pace, alongside one of his signature mirrored rooms, Doorway (1966/2007). Earlier this year, 125 Newbury, the New York space founded by Pace’s Arne Glimcher, presented a selection of previously unexhibited 1960s pastels in dialogue with early 1980s figurative bronze sculptures.

Throughout 2025, Pace is celebrating its 65th anniversary with a series of exhibitions honoring artists who have played a central role in its program for decades. These presentations -staged worldwide- pay tribute to some of the gallery’s longest-standing collaborations, including Jean Dubuffet, Sam Gilliam, Robert Indiana, Robert Irwin, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Joel Shapiro, Antoni Tàpies, and James Turrell. With Pace’s support, these artists have charted new trajectories in the history of art.

Samaras’s art consistently resists historical pigeonholing, distinguished by a persistent focus on the body and psyche, often through autobiographical lenses. Self-representation, self-exploration, and identity have been the driving forces of his practice, which, from its inception in the early 1960s, expanded the Surrealist idiom while radically departing from the dominant currents of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

After emigrating from Greece in 1948, Samaras studied at Rutgers University under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and later at Columbia University, where he studied art history with Meyer Schapiro. During this period, he began painting self-portraits and working with pastels, a medium that allowed for quick execution and the exploration of both figurative and geometric forms in vibrant colors and rich textures—elements that recur throughout his oeuvre. He soon turned to object-making, creating relief assemblages and boxes from materials sourced in his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, colorful threads, and feathers, bonded with wet aluminum or plaster. His work embodies a continuous inquiry into (self) reflection, evident from his earliest mirrored rooms and self-portraits to his recent digital mirror images. Samaras’s entire body of work functions as an extension of himself, emphasizing the transformative potential of the everyday, a true fusion of art and life.

In 1969, Samaras expanded his use of photography, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera that suited his sense of immediacy. His innovation culminated in 1973 with the Polaroid SX-70, which allowed him to manipulate the very surface of the image using dyes, styluses, or even his finger, merging self-portraiture with abstraction. This process evolved further in 1996, when he acquired his first computer and began experimenting with typewriter-paper text prints. By 2002, he had fully integrated digital cameras and Photoshop into his practice, resulting in the Photofictions (2003), with their distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.

The Intermission
The Intermission is a contemporary art exhibition space in Piraeus, founded by Artemis Baltoyanni in September 2019. It invites artists to present work in collaboration with their representing galleries. The Intermission does not represent artists but supports the realization of new art productions through dynamic and creative partnerships. This flexible, unconventional model allows the space to respond to the constantly evolving needs of the local and international art community. Hosting exhibitions by international galleries, The Intermission offers a “pause” from their regular programs, showcasing both established and emerging artists.

Pace Gallery
Pace is one of the world’s leading international art galleries, representing some of the most influential 20th- and 21st-century artists and their estates. Founded in 1960 by Arne Glimcher, Pace has long-standing relationships with artists including Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, and a distinguished history of supporting the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism and the Light and Space movement. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery continues to champion both established figures and rising contemporary voices such as Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, and Marina Perez Simão.