Lucas Samaras, Artist, b.1936, Greece

Description: Sculpture Table (Gold)
gold plated bronze
41 3/4 x 51 1/2 x 35in. (106 x 131 x 89cm.)
Executed in 1981, this work is from an edition of five, two of which are gold plated, two silver plated and one polished bronze

Notes: "In the Sculpture Table, Samaras connects his work with the history of art and so sculpture in a deeper, more complicated way than before... In the broadest sense, the figures are at once Gothic and modern, as if Hieronymous Bosch and Henri Matisse had collaborated, locking together the horror of the flesh with the love of it. Samaras himself speaks of being inspired by a stylized sculpture from the 1890s of the dancer Loie Fuller, her body surrounded and extended by billowing veils. He found that the sculpture expressed 'an emotion so strong that a body is not enough.'

In the figures of Sculpture Table Samaras exposes in an extremely literal manner the various selves within him. In fact, he shows those selves in the actual process of emerging from the bodies that harbour them. We see him as animal, as magician, as seducer, as seduced, as male and female, and as completely at ease with his own polymorphousness" (R. Smith, quoted in "Repeated Exposures: Lucas Samaras in Three Dimensions," in Lucas Samaras, Objects and Subjects: 1969-1986, New York 1988, p. 62). -source invaluable.com