Loukas Samaras passed away at the age of 88pioneering artist, the “man who was his own canvas”, as the New York Times described him.

His death was announced yesterday by the Pace Gallery which organized 30 exhibitions of his works.

Informed of the artist’s death, Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni made the following statement:

“Lukas Samaras, the ‘man who was his own canvas’, as the New York Times aptly described him, was a pioneering visual artist who, with his multifaceted and constantly renewed work, gained global exposure. An artist restless throughout his along the way, he constantly experimented with new tools and techniques, starting with painting and sculpture to quickly move on to photography, for many years in its analogue and finally its digital dimension, reducing it to an eminently expressive medium. of Samaras seems autobiographical, as it focuses on his body, which is also the main object of his experiments. Samaras reaches, however, much further. He starts from himself, which he repositions, metonymically and impersonally, in silence and noise of the megapolis, of which he is emerging as a visual anthropologist. The reception and familiarization of the work in Greece was relatively slow, but universal. To his relatives I address my sincere condolences”.

Loukas Samaras was born on September 14, 1936 in Kastoria. In 1948 and at the age of 12, he immigrated with his mother Trygona Samaras to New York to find his father Damianos, who had already immigrated to the United States since 1939. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1955.

In 1951 he completed his basic education at Memorial High School. Between the years 1954 and 1959, he received a scholarship and studied at the School of Fine Arts and Sciences of the University of Rutgers (Rutgers University), in the region of New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he met the artists Alan Caprov and George Segal. He participates in exhibitions of the first and poses as a model in the works of the second. He is influenced by Claes Oldenburg, one of the creators of Pop Art who includes him, among others, with him artistically in the School of New Jersey.

Thanks to a grant he received from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in 1959, Loukas Samaras continued his studies in art history at Columbia University in New York. In 1961, he attends classes at the drama school of the actress Stella Adler. He then begins to exhibit his works collectively in various galleries. He exhibited for the first time in New York in the years 1968, 1972 and 1977. His conversion from painting, sculpture and engraving to photography becomes evident in the continuation of his artistic career. His creations, usually in closed spaces, contain elements from his daily life. His “self-interviews” as he describes them, are part of his personal “self-interrogation”, as if he wants to express his feelings and make his own form of atonement.

In 1972 buys his first Polaroid camera. In 1975, he discovers the properties of polaroid film dyes. He works on collaged multimedia compositions and transforming the shadows and shades of photographs with polaroid prints to create what he calls “Phototransformations”. His use of himself in his works is interpreted by him as “voyeurism”. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he continues to experiment with other materials in order to “color” his works with colors, natural light, still life. Despite his initial attitude of never visiting Greece, several of his works are inspired by maternal stimuli and childhood memories such as Byzantine icons and the “evil eye”.

In recent years, Loukas Samaras has continued to create art using design programs (computer art), combining the supernatural with the real world of photography. Part of this technological evolution of his work is the production of small films with images and background music that he calls “photoflicks”.