This one is just for fun. A couple of weeks ago, I paid a visit to the studio of Lucas Samaras, which sits on the 62nd floor of a midtown New York building. I went to talk with him about Poses/Born Actors, his new exhibition at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea. A sampling of the works:
I was there to write a piece for The Daily Beast, and Samaras (a “74-year-old multi-media wizard”) knew what that meant — names and stories, rather than the more esoteric aspects of his art. He wasn’t the least bit uncooperative, and we had a blast. “VIP Portrait Show” was published on Friday, and it began this way:
Jasper Johns is there. So are artists Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz, Chuck Close and Lisa Yuskavage. Glenn Lowry, the head of the Museum of Modern Art, and Lisa Phillips, of the New Museum, are side-by-side with collectors Leonard Lauder, Marie-Josee Kravis, Agnes Gund and dozens of similar luminaries….
Why Leonard Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Whitney Museum, but not his brother Ronald, former chairman of MoMA? Where are hot-shot artists Richard Prince and John Currin? Why isn’t Henry Kravis there with his wife? How about alpha collectors Aby Rosen, the real estate tycoon, and Beth Rudin DeWoody, an heir to the Rudin real estate fortune? Sandra Brant is in, but not her ex-husband, newsprint magnate Peter, or his off-again, on-again second wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour….
And so on. (The things you sometimes have to do to get the general public interested in art…)
But as I also say, it’s not clear whether you’d want to be in this group or not. Samaras made the images from digital headshots, lit from below. Starting with those shadowy images, he used Photoshop to create “unpretty” images that exaggerate and reveal — not conceal, Photoshop’s usual task.
It’s a fun show, made more so by the fact that most of Samaras’s subjects didn’t know what he was up to. Their invitation to the opening last Monday night came with a mini-bottle of booze and the suggestion that they drink it before coming.
Read more here and see a gallery of 14 of the photos here.
Above, left to right: Ingrid Sischy, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman (details).
Photo Credit: Courtesy Lucas Samaras and the Pace Gallery.