Lucas Samaras: Boxes and Reconstructions

Lucas Samaras: Boxes and Reconstructions will bring together two seminal bodies of work by the influential Greek-born American artist Lucas Samaras at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery from November 6, 2026 through January 23, 2027. Alongside a selection of iconic, deeply enigmatic box sculptures from the 1960s through the 1980s, Boxes and Reconstructions will also feature never-before-seen fabric paintings from Samaras’s pioneering and little-known Reconstructions series of 1979.

Across more than seven decades at the forefront of the avant-garde, Samaras’s work remained both profoundly personal and formally inventive. Drawing on elements of his personal history—from his childhood amid the Greek Civil War to his later experiences as part of the New York City’s avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s—he engaged sculpture photography, painting and drawing, and digital art to explore the nature of selfhood and identity. Samaras’s boxes, the works for which he best known, underscore his enduring interest in assemblage as an assertion of the self. Presented in dialogue with the sewn fabric works that Samaras called Reconstructions, they illustrate the artist’s uncanny ability to assemble and transform banal materials from the world around him into surreal, self-contained environments.