Pace Gallery Shows Lucas Samaras Boxes, Reconstructions
The New York exhibition pairs decades of Samaras box sculptures with fabric paintings from his 1979 Reconstructions series, shown publicly for the first time.
Updated on Nov. 9, 2026 in Fine Art
Pace Gallery is presenting Lucas Samaras: Boxes and Reconstructions at its 540 West 25th Street location in New York City, opening November 6, 2026 and running through January 23, 2027. The show includes box sculptures from the 1960s through the 1980s alongside never-before-seen hand-sewn fabric paintings from the 1979 Reconstructions series.
Why it matters
The exhibition brings forward work from a Greek-born American artist whose practice spans roughly seven decades, giving New York audiences a focused look at an early avant-garde body of work. Showing the Reconstructions for the first time places a previously unseen series in public view.
The exhibition draws on almost three hundred unique works from Samaras's box series, which began in the early 1960s, alongside Reconstructions works held in the artist's personal collection. The extraction does not state the number of Reconstructions pieces on view.
The players
Lucas Samaras
Lucas Samaras is a Greek-born American artist known for his assemblage sculptures, boxes, and self-portraiture work.
Pace Gallery
Pace Gallery is a major international contemporary art gallery with locations in New York and other cities.
The details
Samaras attached photographs, ephemera, and found objects to box structures using liquid aluminum and plaster, and built the Reconstructions from hand-sewn fabrics in a range of patterns, colors, textures, and shapes. He began making assemblage-based sculpture in the late 1950s while a student at Rutgers, and his personal history includes childhood experiences during the Greek Civil War.
Timeline
1979: Reconstructions fabric works are created.
November 6, 2026: Boxes and Reconstructions opens at Pace Gallery.
January 23, 2027: The exhibition closes at Pace Gallery.
Historical Context
The show follows a pattern of gallery retrospectives reassessing early assemblage work from postwar American artists, placing Samaras's late-1950s and 1960s box sculptures in a long-running discussion of the medium. Its unveiling of the 1979 Reconstructions extends that reassessment to a series that had not been shown publicly.
Visitors can see the exhibition at Pace Gallery at 540 West 25th Street in New York City from November 6, 2026 through January 23, 2027. The Reconstructions fabric works are shown there for the first time, so this is the only scheduled opportunity in the extraction to view them in person.
The takeaway
Lucas Samaras's work shows how a single artist's material experiments, from boxes to fabric, can remain relevant across decades. Readers interested in the medium can see the full range of the exhibition at Pace Gallery through January 2027.
What happens next
The exhibition runs until January 23, 2027, when the Boxes and Reconstructions show closes at Pace Gallery.
Further reading
Explore more Fine Art coverage to see how contemporary galleries are reframing postwar sculpture.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Artdaily.
