NEW YORK – Artist and Kastoria native Lucas Samaras passed away at his home in Manhattan on March 7 at the age of 87, according to the New York Times, which noted that “his death, from complications of a fall, was announced by Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, which represented Samaras for more than five decades.”

“Emerging in the late 1950s amid a generation of artists, among them Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and Carolee Schneemann, who propelled the American art world in daring new directions after the strictures of Abstract Expressionism, Samaras was a wild card even within a rabble-rousing crowd,” the Times reported, adding that “smudgy cartoonlike pastels coexisted with raw plaster works and jewel boxes bedecked elaborately with wool, glass, straight pins, knives and sometimes taxidermied birds – animistic objects that resembled little else being made in the 1960s.”

“In 1964, after he had to move out of his childhood home in West New York, NJ, at the age of 28, he meticulously recreated his cluttered bedroom studio as a work of art,” the Times reported, noting that “staged inside the Green Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, the room was a poignant display of place and loss in the form of deadpan conceptual art.”

“It is my past, complete – a piece of biography – the realest thing I could do,” Samaras told the Times then, noting “that the bedroom, priced at $17,000, had ‘no nibbles’ from collectors during the exhibition.”

“Most of the furniture later went to the Salvation Army and the rest to Samaras’ new apartment,” the Times reported, adding that “from then on, Samaras’ inward gaze sought only further horizons.”

“In a series of ‘autointerviews’ he conducted in the early 1970s, he asked himself what was already the most pertinent question about his work: Why are you so interested in yourself?” the Times reported, noting that “he answered: ‘I use myself and therefore I don’t have to go through all the extraneous kinds of relationships like finding models and pretending artistic distance or finding workers or finding some symbol of geometry. I use myself also because it is still unorthodox to use one’s self.’”

“He pressed himself: Do you call that narcissism? To which he responded: ‘Call it what you will. I get things done,’” the Times reported.

“Lucas Samaras (his family name means ‘saddle maker’ in Greek) was born on September 14, 1936, in Kastoria, in the Western Macedonia region of Greece, and grew up amid the devastation of World War II and the Greek Civil War,” the Times reported, adding that “when he was an infant, his family home was heavily damaged by artillery fire, which killed his grandmother.”

“His father, Damianos, a furrier, left for several years to work in New York,” the times reported, noting that “Samaras became very close to his mother, Trigona, and to two aunts who were seamstresses and allowed him to cut patterns with paper.”

“In 1948, the entire family immigrated to the United States, settling in New Jersey,” the Times reported, adding that “in his teens, Samaras worked briefly for his father in the fur trade [and] that experience shaped an intense feeling for materials, partly through a hatred of fur that the job engendered.”

“Fur’s a soft, smelly, sweaty, pliable thing,” he once said, the Times reported. “And then I end up using pins: a hard, brilliant, sharp substance.”

“In 1955, he won a scholarship to Rutgers University as it was becoming a crucible of the American avant-garde under the professorships of Kaprow, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks, and later Roy Lichtenstein,” the Times reported, noting that “along with students and friends like Robert Whitman, George Brecht, and George Segal, he helped sow the seeds of conceptual art, Pop Art, and what would become known as performance art, based on a philosophy of demolishing artificial barriers between art and everyday life.”

“At the artist-run Reuben Gallery in the East Village, Samaras was a lead performer in Kaprow’s ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’, a landmark 1959 event that employed chance, absurdity, cheap materials and mundane actions in ways that repurposed early-20th-century Dada for the Cold War era,” the Times reported, adding that “Samaras, who was studying acting around this time at the Stella Adler Conservatory, also participated in pioneering art performances by Whitman and by Oldenburg, who said that Samaras helped set the terms of the new form.”

“Samaras’ theatrical days were short-lived,” however, as “his own performance-related fantasies, he explained, were too elaborate to carry out with other people, and so he began channeling those impulses into sculptural work and writing,” the Times reported, pointing out that “during a two-year period at Columbia University studying art history under Meyer Schapiro, he plunged headlong into making art, often in long-term, recurring series” and “his box sculptures, which became a trademark of his work, were numbered beginning in 1962.”

“In 1969 he discovered the Polaroid instant camera, which became a magic lantern in his hands, opening avenues of experimentation that continued for the rest of his life,” the Times reported, adding that “working in the modest confines of a one-bedroom apartment on West 71st Street, he created hybrid photograph-paintings, often naked self-portraits overlaid with dots and swirls.”

“He also took advantage of a manufacturing quirk that left some Polaroid prints vulnerable to temporary manipulation beneath their Mylar protective layer, seizing the opportunity to shape phantasmagoric scenes he called ‘Photo-Transformations’, in which his body or parts of it appeared amid maelstroms of color and swirling forms,” the Times reported, noting that “in the late 1980s, after what he called ‘a pseudo-transformative sort of epiphany,’ he radically narrowed what had already been a tight social circle around himself.”

“Reducing contact with friends and relations, he became almost a recluse in a new apartment and studio on the 62nd floor of a 1980s high-rise in Midtown Manhattan, where he lived alone, tended to keep the curtains drawn, and ate the same meal, soup, almost every day” the Times reported.

“You can’t live in a constant state of ecstasy,” he said of his decision, the Times reported. “You need so many pounds of pain, so many pounds of disappointment, so many pounds of dissatisfaction and so on.”

“In 2009, he represented his native Greece at the Venice Biennale, showing a piece, ‘Ecdysiast’ (H.L. Mencken’s grandiose, Greek-influenced euphemism for a striptease artist), in which he recorded the reactions of friends and colleagues as they watched a distorted video of him, at the age of 73, undressing,” the Times reported, adding that

“in the early self-interviews and writings, Samaras returned frequently to the question of how his reflexive isolation and solipsism could function alongside his equally instinctual exhibitionism and visual extroversion.”

“I was my own Peeping Tom, because of the absence of people I could do anything,” he wrote, the Times reported, adding that “I formulated myself, I mated with myself, and I gave birth to myself. And my real self was the product.”

“He is survived by his sister, Carol Samaras,” the Times reported.