Lucas Samaras at NYC's 125 Newbury Gallery

Lucas Samaras, Sculpture Table, 1981. Sculpture, silver-plated bronze, 41-3/4 x 51-1/2 x 35-1/4 in. © Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery, NYC

By JONATHAN GOODMAN April 3, 2025

The late Lucas Samaras was outstanding both as a representational and abstract artist. In this show, all the chalk works and the sculptures are given to figurative imagery. The pastels are modest in size; they offer bold color schemes and a poetic ambience. The sculptural works are tabletop efforts that reprise earlier examples of three-dimensional art but, at the same time, stay contemporary by virtue of their bold handling of form. Today, not so many prominent artists are working in a way so redolent of the past, but Samaras, who was originally from Greece, studied at Rutgers and participated in the Fluxus Group. Despite the fact that he is working with traditional genres of image-making, Samaras at the same time invested his art with a genuinely contemporary aura--due to its warmth of feeling, to the figurative skill he had been given, and to the compositional depth of his eye.

This can be seen immediately in the work. In one untitled, undated chalk drawing, Samaras paints the pictures of a young Greek man, who wears a white shirt with yellow streaks and has a long moustache that extends as far as his cheeks. His head of black hair is rather closely cropped, and a bright orange background enlivens the scene.

Lucas Samaras, Untitled, July 17, 1962. Work on paper, pastel on paper, 12 x 9 in. © Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery

Samaras had complete control over his medium, but that was not his main concern. He is more interested in finding an emotional message in the image. The man described above feels thoughtful and meditative even though we don't know what he is thinking about. In a second drawing of a person, a small pale head stares at us, surrounded by a black background. But his bright face, an irregularly outlined explosion of small, variously colored flowers, seen as dots of color against white, engage our attention by surprise. The surreal scene keeps the image in mind.

Finally, the sculpture titled "Reclining Curvaceous VII" (1981),consists of a tabletop-size reclining female nude. She has minimal facial features and a thick head of hair, and placed in her mid-section is a disembodied male head, with an unidentifiable growth on its crown. The woman is nude and indeed curvaceous, her breasts prominently displayed. This work seems to mimic a similar nude created earlier in the 20th century by Henri Matisse.

Lucas Samaras, Reclining Curvaceous VII, 1981. Sculpture, silver plated bronze, 5-1/4 x 16 x 7-3/4 in. © Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery

The possible historical allusion centers the meaning of Samaras's effort, which is open to such suggestion due to his traditional stance. This is more than emotionally compelling given that the date is so late in a century given to experimentation. We are taken by the accessible nature of Samaras's art. It is true enough that Samaras has a highly abstract installation in the mid-Hudson Valley at Dia Beacon, but the works on paper and the sculptures in the Newbury Gallery show makes clear his commitment to figuration. WM