M&T Bank Gallery
Seymour H. Knox Building
June 12, 2023–January 2, 2024

Lucas Samaras was born in Macedonia, Greece, in 1936 and immigrated to the United States in 1948. He studied at Rutgers University under artists such as Allan Kaprow (American, 1927–2006) and George Segal (American, 1924–2000). Later, while studying art history at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro, a scholar known for emphasizing the social context of art, Samaras started creating self-portraits and exploring the relationship of his work to his identity. In the 1950s and 1960s, his involvement with Happenings—combinations of performance, theater, and visual art—would shape his evolving approach to sculpture. Before he made the Mirrored Room, the sculptural installation at the heart of Looking Back, Samaras had already become interested in using boxes as the basis of his sculptures, many of which he encrusted with found elements. Items such as yarn, bones, fake hair, and taxidermied birds—atypical for the art of the time—spoke to Samaras’s life. The silver paint and tin foil he used in the early works developed into mirror. Inherently autobiographical, the mirrored surface innately bears the image of not only the maker but also everyone who sees and experiences or inhabits the work.

Samaras arrived at the idea of a literal mirrored room in 1963 while writing a short story in which the character lived in a mirrored house. In a 1968 letter to a curator of what was then the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG), Samaras explained that mirrors had long fascinated him for their playfulness, their religious and psychological implications, their use in other artworks, in fairy tales and myths, and in palaces. Describing the experience of being inside the Mirrored Room, he writes:

Being [embedded] in this huge [crystalline] structure that has no top, bottom, or sides, this feeling of suspension, this feeling of polite claustrophobia or acrophobia, this feeling of fakery or loneliness seems complex, associatively enveloping and valid to me as a work of art, wonder, sensuality, pessimistic theory, and partial invisibility.

Embracing this perplexing and disorienting experience, Samaras offers visitors an opportunity to lose themselves, to question their sense of reality, and to see their identities fractured and multiplied endlessly.