Beacon, New York, September 18, 2024 – Opening on September 20, 2024, at Dia Beacon, a presentation of works by Lucas Samaras brings the artist’s unique perspective on Minimalism to Dia’s galleries. The exhibition features Cubes and Trapezoids (1994–95) that were gifted by the artist in 2013 and are presented for the first time since their 1994 debut at Pace Gallery, alongside a significant loan of one of the artist’s signature mirrored rooms, Doorway (1966/2007). This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo museum show since his passing earlier this year and is the last exhibition he collaborated on directly.

For over 60 years, 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.

“Lucas Samaras’s work infuses the vocabulary of Minimalism with a psychological dimension through his use of highly associative materials, centering personal narrative, and implicating the viewer’s bodily perception and experience. Shown in tandem with a display of fellow Rutgers-graduate Keith Sonnier’s work, opening in October, who similarly engages with materiality through a performative approach to sculpture, this exhibition further expands Dia’s narrative of radically experimental practices emerging in the 1960s and ’70s,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

The Cubes on view, 24 totemic wooden volumes, are coated in pale gray Nevamar laminate and feature cutouts of various geometrical shapes, appearing at once futuristic and primordial. Their surface treatment identical to fixtures installed in the artist’s then-new apartment, 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. Dia’s presentation of the Cubes will be the first time the work is shown in a grid configuration, determined by the artist while on-site at Dia Beacon. The corresponding wall-works, Trapezoids, are made of eight irregular quadrilateral forms with oblique angles, slightly inset in uniform Masonite boards, and covered in the same gray laminate as the Cubes with an added latex-paint finish. While their surfaces are non-reflective, they nonetheless respond to light and complement the mirrored panels of the adjacent sculptural installation.

Doorway, 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. Expanding upon the artist’s assemblage boxes, which he began producing in 1960 and often incorporated mirrors or other reflective elements, Doorway is an embodied environment in which one can participate both as subject and viewer. The structure of Doorway frames a smaller mirrored cube protruding from its center, adding another layer of distortion and furthering the disorientating effect of seeing one’s image fragmented and dispersed.

“This focused presentation at Dia Beacon materially and metaphorically evokes the body and its inner workings, perverting the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the messy realities of identity and interiority. Working closely with Samaras on this installation revealed important nuances in his ideal orientation of the works, and I am thrilled to bring them as the artist intended to our audience at Dia Beacon,” said Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head.

Lucas Samaras is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

Lucas Samaras is made possible by major support from the Estate of Lucas Samaras and Pace Gallery. Generous support by Irene Panagopoulos. Additional support by Katherine Embiricos and the David Schwartz Foundation, Inc.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include: 

• Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York
• De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
• Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
• De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany 
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

For additional information or materials, contact: 

(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630