Untitled (Fork and Spoon),

1961

Samaras studied with Allan Kaprow at Rutgers College in the 1950s. After graduating, he entered the art history program at Columbia and began to show at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Like many of the artists associated with that space, Samaras demonstrated a fascination with found, industrial materials—kitchen implements often figured in his work—that he recontextualized in uncanny, frequently disconcerting ways. Like the self-portraits for which he is perhaps best known, Samaras’s assemblages contain alternately violent and erotic, religious and fantastical subtexts.