Lucas Samaras

Lucas Samaras’s versatile, prodigious multimedia practice riffs on the tradition of the self-portrait. Throughout his paintings, assemblages, and—perhaps most famously—photographs, Samaras obsessively investigates the self. Some of his most iconic works are his Surrealist-tinged Polaroid self-portraits, which he manipulates via scratches and smears across surfaces during development. The results are strange, swirling compositions that blur the line between photography and painting. Samaras has also worked in performance and made assemblages out of random detritus in his immediate surroundings, producing self-portraits from found objects. He has exhibited extensively in cities around the world. His work has sold for six figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.