
Hannah Shapiro
Cataloguer & Sale Coordinator
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Sold for US$48,640 inc. premium
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Cataloguer & Sale Coordinator

Head of Department

Specialist, Head of Sale
Provenance
Pace Gallery, New York
Russell Bowman Art Advisory, Chicago
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2009
Literature
cf. Lucas Samaras: Photo-Transformations (New York, 2018), pl. 15 and endpapers (variant)
Note
The debut of the Polaroid SX-70 camera in 1972 signaled a new photographic system that eliminated the mess and intense labor of the darkroom. For Lucas Samaras, however, the SX-70 presented an opportunity for pushing the boundaries of analog photography. Once the pre-packaged film unit was ejected from the camera, Samaras would rub, smear, and shift the latent emulsion layers—using either his hand or a stylus—before the composition was fully set. As seen in Lots 6 and 7, the resulting images often distort his own body by creating colorful, swirling matrices and hallucinatory compositions.