For over 60 years, Lucas Samaras worked fluidly across mediums including performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, film, and photography, in a manner that eluded categorization. The artist’s eccentric and uncanny objects often combine formal strategies of Minimalism—the cube, grid, and monochrome—with a Surrealist and Fluxus sensibility, cultivating the haptic materiality of everyday objects, among them boxes and furniture, and imbuing them with phantasmagoria and personal symbolism. Such is the case with Cubes and Trapezoids (1994–95), two related bodies of work presented at Dia Beacon for the first time since their 1994 debut at Pace Gallery in New York. Accompanying the sculptures is Doorway (1966/2007), one of the artist’s signature mirrored rooms, further emphasizing Samaras’s enduring engagement with the cube as a vessel for the body, its image, and the psyche.

The Cubes on view, 24 totemic wooden volumes, are arranged in an expansive grid as specified by the artist. The volumes are coated in pale gray Nevamar laminate and feature cutouts of various geometrical shapes, appearing at once futuristic and primordial. The Cubes’ labyrinthian internal geometries were sketched out by the artist as he serially exhausted the structure’s possible permutations. A material index of Samaras’s move to a high-rise apartment building where he installed custom fixtures with the same monochromatic surface treatment, the sculptures merge the Minimal cube with interior architecture and autobiography, demonstrating how Samaras synthesized elements of formal abstraction with the personal, psychological, and domestic.

The corresponding wall-works, from the Trapezoids series, are made of eight irregular quadrilateral forms with oblique angles, nestled within uniform Masonite boards, and covered in the same gray laminate as the Cubes with an added latex-paint finish. While their surfaces are nonreflective, they nonetheless respond to light and complement the mirrored panels of the adjacent installation. Doorway, which was conceived in 1966 and only first realized in 2007, emerged out of a lineage of Samaras’s environments where he obliterated the divide between interior and exterior, private and public. The artist’s first Room #1 (1964), a restaging of his New Jersey apartment inside Green Gallery in New York, was followed by the first mirrored environment, Room #2, an inhabitable cube furnished with a reflective table and a chair at Pace Gallery in 1966, the same year he conceptualized Doorway.

Emerging as an artist in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Samaras took part in Happenings—participatory, intermedia events, initiated by one of his teachers, Allan Kaprow—and continued using his body as a medium in his own work, treating it as a performative site. In reflecting on his part in the Happenings, he contended, “I sort of thought of them as constructions—like constructing a box, let’s say, only on a grander scale.” Indeed, in 1960, Samaras turned to making his mixed-media boxes, ornate with personal or found objects, of which he made 295 in his lifetime. By constructing boxes, or altering existing ones, and adorning them with an eclectic range of quotidian materials like beads, yarn, rhinestones, pins, nails, razor blades, and stuffed birds, Samaras underscored their tactility and disrupted their functionality, rendering them reliquaries of desire and repulsion. He often incorporated mirrors or reflective elements into the boxes, marking an enduring interest in self-image and reflection.

A scaled-up box with openings on two sides, Doorway is an embodied container in which one can participate both as subject and viewer. The structure frames a smaller mirrored cube (also with openings on two sides) protruding from its center, adding another layer of distortion and furthering the disorientating effect of seeing one’s image fragmented and dispersed. Exhibited together, the domestically infused geometries of Cubes and Trapezoids and the nested mirrored environment of Doorway evoke the body and its inner workings, perverting the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the messy realities of identity and interiority.

—Jordan Carter and Liv Cuniberti

All Cubes 1994, Nevamar on wood; all Trapezoids 1995, Nevamar and latex paint on Masonite
Dia Art Foundation; gift of Lucas Samaras and Pace Gallery

1. Cube with Gap
2. Cube with Four Cuts
3. Cube with Vertical Opening
4. Cube with Sliver Openings
5. Cube with Eight Slashes
6. Cube with In-Out Pyramids
7. Cube with Opening
8. Cube with Zigurat
9. Cube with Twist
10. Cube with Zig Zags and Crosses
11. Cube with Small Cubes and Cross
12. Cube with Upright Beams
13. Cube with Four Points
14. Cube with Cross Beams
15. Cube with Slant
16. Cube with Uneven S
17. Cube with Cubes and Slash
18. Cube with Low Slashes
19. Cube with Cross and Beams
20. Cube with Steps
21. Cube with Facing Points
22. Cube with Inward Pyramids and Zigurats
23. Cube with Slashed Beam
24. Cube with Up-Down Pyramid
25. Trapezoid #15
26. Trapezoid #16
27. Trapezoid #17
28. Trapezoid #18
29. Trapezoid #19
30. Trapezoid #20
31. Trapezoid #21
32. Trapezoid #22
33. Doorway, 1966/2007
    Aluminum, wood, and mirrors
    Dia Art Foundation; gift of the Estate of Lucas Samaras
    *Access to Doorway is limited.

Lucas Samaras was born in Kastoria, Greece, in 1936. In 1948, he emigrated to New Jersey. He received a degree in art—studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal—from Rutgers University, New Jersey, a milieu that encouraged proto-Fluxus interdisciplinary experimentation and where he would meet the likes of George Brecht and Robert Whitman. He later studied art history at Columbia University, New York, under Meyer Schapiro. His first solo exhibition in New York was held at Rueben Gallery in 1959, and in the same year he participated in Kaprow’s first Happening, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, held at the gallery. In 1961, Samaras debuted his signature assemblage boxes at Green Gallery, New York. Later that year, the boxes were included in his first institutional group show, The Art of Assemblage, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he would receive his first solo institutional exhibition in 1969. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1972); the National Gallery, Alexandros Sousos Museum, Athens (2005); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2014). In 2009, Samaras represented Greece at the International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where Doorway (1966/2007) was exhibited, and in 2017, his work was included in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Samaras died in New York in 2024.

Lucas Samaras | September 18, 2024