Pace Prints is pleased to present an exhibition of prints, artist books and multiples by Lucas Samaras. The exhibition, at Pace Prints’ 32 E. 57th Street gallery, will correspond with a survey of the artist’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Offerings from a Restless Soul,” which will be on view from February 24 through June 1, 2014.
Lucas Samaras was born in 1936 in Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece. He moved to the United States as a teenager, where he attended Rutgers University and Columbia University. The prolific artist has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions and career retrospectives. In 2009, Samaras represented Greece at the Venice Bienniale. While his work has encompassed a vast array of mediums and styles, the artist has remained conceptually consistent throughout his career, focusing on inner psychology, self-portraiture, transformation and mysticism.
Featured in the Pace Prints exhibition will be several bodies of work by Samaras, published by Pace Editions over the past six decades.
Book from 1968 is a sculptural multiple composed of original silkscreen prints, paper foldouts, embossing and die-cuts. An edition of 100, Book holds the distinction of being the first item ever published by Pace Editions.
Autoportraiture plays a pertinent role in Samaras’ work, a notion demonstrated in Album Deluxe, a publication released by Pace Editions and the Whitney Museum in 1971, in which the artist presents a vast selection of Polaroid self-portraits, auto-interviews, and photographic collages.
Samaras’ Self-Portrait series of relief engravings from 1994 are composed of delicate, pin-like marks that form images of the artist, in an edition of 30.
Also on view will be vibrant silkscreen prints created by Samaras at Pace Prints in the 1960s and 70s, and the later series Mythologies, which is comprised of inkblot-style black and white etchings, from 1995.