Lucas Samaras, who sang the song of self louder and in more keys than perhaps any other postwar visual artist, creating a wildly diverse body of work in which his own lithe body, bearded face and personal effects took center stage in countless shape-shifting guises, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
His death, from complications of a fall, was announced by Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, which represented Mr. Samaras for more than five decades.
Emerging in the late 1950s amid a generation of artists, among them Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann, who propelled the American art world in daring new directions after the strictures of Abstract Expressionism, Mr. Samaras (pronounced suh-MARE-us) was a wild card even within a rabble-rousing crowd.
Smudgy cartoonlike pastels coexisted with raw plaster works and jewel boxes bedecked elaborately with wool, glass, straight pins, knives and sometimes taxidermized birds — animistic objects that resembled little else being made in the 1960s.
In 1964, after he had to move out of his childhood home in West New York, N.J., at the age of 28, he meticulously recreated his cluttered bedroom studio as a work of art. Staged inside the Green Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, the room was a poignant display of place and loss in the form of deadpan conceptual art.
