Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking at the Art Institute of Chicago offers a comprehensive glance at the artist’s innovative use of Polaroid photography from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The exhibition, drawn primarily from the museum’s collection and augmented by gifts from the Samaras estate, features more than 40 works that trace his evolving experimentation with the medium. Spanning early AutoPolaroids to large-scale Sitting tableaux and sliced panoramas, the show positions Samaras as a pivotal figure in the artistic exploration of instant photography.
The exhibition highlights how Samaras embraced the physical and chemical properties of Polaroid film, manipulating its layers to create surreal, psychologically charged images. His operate diverged from contemporaries who used photography for narrative or cinematic effect, instead turning the medium inward to explore identity, perception and the self in isolated, introspective acts. Pieces like AutoPolaroids (1969–70) predate Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills and are recognized as an early influence on conceptual self-portraiture, though Samaras’s approach remains distinct in its raw, intimate engagement with the photographic process.
A centerpiece of the exhibition is Photo-Transformation, November 6, 1973, in which Samaras manually altered the 20 layers of a Polaroid print using his fingers or a stylus. This hands-on intervention produced a haunting image of a human eye surrounded by turbulent, swirling marks—evoking both biological intensity and emotional turbulence. The work exemplifies his belief in the Polaroid not just as a recording tool, but as a malleable medium capable of expressing inner states through direct physical intervention.
Later in the 1970s, Samaras participated in Polaroid’s testing of a latest 8×10 camera, which required a shift in his technique. Because the larger format prevented the kind of emulsion manipulation he had used with SX-70 prints, he adapted by performing transformations in front of the camera. The resulting Still Life (1978) depicts a cluttered studio table where brushes, coffee cans, and plants compete for attention with a disembodied, seemingly growling head—a work critics have interpreted as a confrontation between domestic routine and psychological eruption.
The exhibition’s title reflects recurring motifs in Samaras’s work: figures in various states of being—sitting, standing, walking, looking—often isolated or duplicated, suggesting states of awareness, hesitation, or self-surveillance. These themes align with broader postwar concerns about subjectivity and the fragmented self, particularly in the context of rising consumer culture and mass media. Samaras’s use of Polaroid, a domestic and immediate technology, allowed him to stage these psychological dramas in private, almost ritualistic performances.
While the Art Institute of Chicago has not released an official catalog for the exhibition as of this writing, the museum’s website confirms the show’s run through July 20, 2026. The institution notes that the presentation draws from its long-standing holdings of Samaras’s work, including key pieces acquired over decades, and acknowledges recent contributions from the artist’s estate that have expanded the depth and scope of the display.
Samaras, born in 1936 in Greece and based in New York for much of his career, worked across media including sculpture, painting, and performance. His Polaroid experiments remain among his most influential contributions to postwar art, anticipating later developments in conceptual photography and self-directed imagery. The Art Institute’s exhibition affirms his legacy not as a mere experimenter with novelty technology, but as an artist who used the constraints and affordances of Polaroid to probe enduring questions about identity, presence, and the limits of representation.
For visitors, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view a sustained body of work that reveals how a technically limited medium—often dismissed for its unpredictability and chemical instability—became, in Samaras’s hands, a vehicle for profound artistic inquiry. The show remains on view at the Art Institute of Chicago’s modern and contemporary wings through July 20, 2026, with admission details and hours available on the museum’s official website.