Lucas Samaras: PhotoFlicks (iMovies) and PhotoFictions (A to Z)
LUCAS SAMARAS EXHIBITION ON VIEW IN CHELSEA AND 57TH STREET
Artist’s first exhibition since 2003-2004 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective and first film work since 1969
For further information, please contact Sarah Kurz at:
212-421-3292, or [email protected]
New York, March 14, 2005 --- PaceWildenstein and Pace/MacGill Gallery are pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of films and photographs by Lucas Samaras entitled PhotoFlicks (iMovies) and PhotoFictions (A to Z). The digital video work represents the first time in nearly forty years that Samaras has worked with the moving image. The exhibition will be on view in New York from April 8 through May 7, 2005 at PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, and at Pace/MacGill Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, 9th floor from April 8 through April 30, 2005.
The PhotoFlicks (iMovies) and PhotoFictions (A to Z) installation in the two galleries will allow visitors to select and view 60 short films and 4,432 still images on individual computer monitors. Thirty-five Apple work stations, each of which replicate the computer in the artist’s studio, set-up the way the artist has it in his studio, will be on exhibit so multiple visitors can view the work simultaneously.
While Samaras is widely known for creating sculpture, drawings, paintings, photographs and using diverse mediums including beads, chicken wire, clay, Cor-ten steel, fabric, pastel, pencil, pins, plaster, and oil, his pioneering photography work has been a constant influence to himself and others for several decades. Likewise, Samaras’s one-time foray into film, in1969, when he made Self, a 23 minute 16 mm film with Kim Levin, which premiered at The Museum of Modern Art in New York that summer, is perhaps one of the most defining and telling works of that era.
The origins of PhotoFlicks (iMovies) and PhotoFictions (A to Z) can also be traced back to the late 1950s and early 1960s when Samaras studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory and later participated in various Happenings with Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, and Claes Oldenburg among others.
Claes Oldenburg once remarked about Samaras’s participation in the Happenings, “Lucas was the perfect performer actually for these things. Whatever he did, he did very slowly, obsessively, calculatedly.”
Lucas Samaras (b. 1936 Macedonia, Greece) is in numerous permanent collections worldwide including: The Art Institute, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Tate Britain, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
His mirrored structures are in several museum collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Los Angeles County Museum; and the Denver Museum of Art.
In addition to Unrepentant Ego, a recent survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lucas Samaras has been the subject of six retrospectives in the past thirty-two years; these included exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971); his first Whitney retrospective (1972-73); Samaras Pastels, a drawing survey organized by the Denver Art Musuem that traveled to six additional venues (1981-83); a retrospective of his Polaroid photographs from 1969-1983 that traveled to twelve museum venues in twelve European and American cities (1983-84); Lucas Samaras: Objects and Subjects 1969-1986 organized by the Denver Art Museum that traveled to five museums including the High Museum, Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Lucas Samaras – Self: 1961-1991 organized by the Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan.
