River of Becoming

Lucas Samaras was one of the great avant-garde artists of the last few decades. Renowned both for his use of fabrics and for his deployment of everyday objects in his installations, he was perhaps best known for his work in photography, where he frequently took himself as a subject. This lavishly illustrated volume is the authoritative biography of a consummate self-portraitist and a riveting depiction of a paradoxical personality: of an artist whose work in the 1960s and 70s prefigured the vindicated narcissism of the selfie era, but who also showed every sign of being a quiet and agoraphobic maverick at war with the mindset of calculated sociability. From his sensitive evocation of Samarass childhood in wartime Greece through to his perceptive interpretation of the artists career in the United States, Michael Skafidas has produced an outstanding account of his subjects life and work. It is also an intriguing record of his own relationship with Samaras, and a powerful meditation on the art of life-writing.