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Samuel Bak has been painting since he was a boy in the Vilna Ghetto where he was born. At the war’s end, he and his mother were one of the few survivors of that terrible time and place. He had his first solo show in the ghetto at the age of nine and has been challenging the senses of his viewers ever since. His work is as unique as he himself is. In each work, there is something for every viewer. He expects each of us to see his world through the lens of our own experience. It is truly fine art dealing with the most difficult to understand human issues yet with an accessibility which brings new insights into our lives.
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Bak’s art is unusual to say the least. Stemming from the classics, seemingly surrealistic in nature, it is beyond reality but is firmly rooted in the real world and his experiences in the Holocaust. All of Bak’s work brings the viewer back to the ghetto, the Holocaust, the idea of ausrotten, extirpating, the Jew from the world. More than a decade ago, Bak let us into his world, “My paintings [convey] a sense of a world that was shattered, of a world that was broken, of a world that exists again through an enormous effort to put everything together, when it is absolutely impossible to put it together again because the broken things can never become whole again. But we can still make something that looks as if it was whole and live with it.”
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