“I’ve been alone for 20 years,” Samaras remarked at the outset of the Covid crisis, “so being in my apartment now, again, is not a big deal. All that’s different now is the possible destruction of all of the things that you knew were around.” Those things included the throngs of tourists, visitors, and office workers who normally packed the streets of the artist’s Midtown Manhattan neighborhood each day, and which suddenly disappeared with the outbreak of the pandemic.

This online exhibition features two bodies of work completed in late 2020, when Samaras photographed the emptied streets and paused construction sites around his neighborhood. In his Gestures series (2008 - ), he populates these images with a cast of creaturely “performers”—brightly-colored gestural abstractions that suggest figures—transforming the city into theatrical backdrop. In his concurrent Constructions (2008 - ), empty worksites morph into surreal landscapes that both fascinate and threaten. Through his digital manipulations—strange mirrorings, unnatural saturations, and compositional fractures—Samaras maps the thresholds between his own personal cosmos and the world outside, registering the increasingly frayed edges of our shared reality.

The exhibition coincides with the featuring of Lucas Samaras’s Gestures series on the cover of the January / February 2021 issue of Artforum. Samaras is the first and only artist to have been granted four cover features for the magazine. To mark the occasion, the artist spoke to editor-in-chief David Velasco—who describes these recent works as “one of the great projects of quarantine”— in a recorded conversation via Zoom.