Lucas Samaras: Boxes and Reconstructions — Lucas Samaras

Lucas Samaras: Boxes and Reconstructions will bring together two seminal bodies of work by the influential Greek-born American artist Lucas Samaras at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery from November 6, 2026 through January 23, 2027. Alongside a selection of iconic, deeply enigmatic box sculptures from the 1960s through the 1980s, Boxes and Reconstructions will also feature never-before-seen fabric paintings from Samaras’s pioneering and little-known Reconstructions series of 1979.

Across more than seven decades at the forefront of the avant-garde, Samaras’s work remained both profoundly personal and formally inventive. Drawing on elements of his personal history—from his childhood amid the Greek Civil War to his later experiences as part of the New York City’s avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s—he engaged sculpture photography, painting and drawing, and digital art to explore the nature of selfhood and identity. Samaras’s boxes, the works for which he best known, underscore his enduring interest in assemblage as an assertion of the self. Presented in dialogue with the sewn fabric works that Samaras called Reconstructions, they illustrate the artist’s uncanny ability to assemble and transform banal materials from the world around him into surreal, self-contained environments.

Samaras began making crude assemblage-based sculpture in the late 1950s, while still a student at Rutgers and an active participant in the Happenings movement in New York. In his long-running series of mixed-media, interactive boxes, which began in the early 1960s, Samaras used liquid aluminum and plaster to attach photographs, ephemera, and found objects—including cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—to structures nested with compartments, drawers, and other interior spaces. Art critic Thomas McEvilley described this process of collecting and repurposing the stuff of life as a kind of self-portraiture: “History’s wreckage in World War II, a fact somewhat shrouded from American artists, left [Samaras] not with a search for history but with the theme of the self unsupported by historical mission: the delicacy and courage of selfhood on its own, finding new uses for the random remains of history, constructing a world out of them.”

Although begun in the early 1960s, Samaras continued his box series over the course of the next three decades. In total, the series includes almost three hundred unique works. Boxes and Reconstructions highlights a selection illustrating the development of these works over time, from the relatively straightforward hinged construction of the rectangular Box #5 (1963–1968) to the sinuous yet also sinister curves of the Cor-ten steel Stiff Box #14 (1971) and the cosmic Box #133 (1989). “Samaras’s assemblage boxes continue their wicked, seductively beautiful ways,” wrote the critic Roberta Smith, “only more so, since the artist knits together and patterns color, the ultimate tool of visual seduction, more complexly. [T]he viewer is cast as involuntary voyeur. . . everyday objects and materials take on unexpected lives of their own.” Possessing elements of sculpture, architecture, and painting, the boxes are some of Samaras’s most evocative and intimate works.

Boxes and Reconstructions places these objects in conversation with a group of works belonging to Samaras’s Reconstructions series of 1979. These works, which come from the personal collection of the artist, will be exhibited here for the first time. Like the boxes, Samaras’s complex compositions of hand-sewn fabrics incorporate a range of patterns, colors, textures, and shapes in extraordinarily active configurations. The use of fabric also has autobiographical connotations for the artist. “I had a cousin in Greece who had a dress shop,” he told Barbara Rose in 1978. “I would go there in the afternoon and I would cut up some paper. But, if I went to touch the fabric, she would say, ‘now watch it, don’t touch the fabric.’ When I became an adult, or semi-adult, I began using things like pins and wool, and nobody could tell me anymore, don’t use them, don't touch them. Even using the fabric, in a sense, is going back to childhood again.”

In part, the Reconstructions are homages to the textiles that surrounded Samaras in his youth, yet their overall effect is—like all of his work—harder to classify. Seen in the light of his later explorations in digital art and photography, the scramble of visual information they present can resemble distorted signals or a collection of pixels. Most of all, however, they suggest paintings. As art critic Kim Levin has written, “Samaras’s Reconstructions must be seen as paintings, highly sophisticated and completely perverse. Big dazzling abstractions. They are also variegated, witty, improvisational hybrid surfaces that fuse random and disparate materials into a seamless expressive whole. They reconstruct not folk handicraft but modernist art.”

Eluding historical categorization, Lucas Samaras’s oeuvre is united through its consistent focus on the body and psyche, often emphasizing autobiography. The themes of self-depiction, self-investigation, and identity were a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom while proposing a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.