BOSTON, MASS.- Montserrat College of Art Gallery will present Samuel Bak and the Art of Remembrance, Jan. 19 – March 5, 2022, at 23 Essex Street. Presented in cooperation with Pucker Gallery, Boston, this exhibition presents a selection of paintings by the acclaimed artist and Holocaust survivor. A public reception will be held on Jan. 27 from 5-7 pm. It is free and open to the public.

Samuel Bak weaves together personal and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience, which he survived as a young boy. Over a long and rich artistic career, Bak has cultivated and explored a painterly visual language that retrieves historical memory with the purpose of preserving Jewish life and culture in the aftermath of unfathomable atrocity.

Samuel Bak and the Art of Remembrance brings together over 30 paintings and works on paper from the 1990s to the present and explores the function of memory in the artist’s work. Painting is the catalyst for the retrieval of memory. Bak interrogates his experience of the Holocaust not through explicit depictions of human suffering, but rather by an expansive vocabulary of personal, cultural, and religious symbols. In a rich palette of ochres, reds, greens, and browns, Bak paints an array of recognizable objects, such as teacups, books, candles, and trees that populate his surrealistic and haunted landscapes, serving as surrogates and material witnesses to irretrievable loss and destruction.

Samuel Bak and the Art of Remembrance considers Bak’s artistic practice as an act of resilience and as a means of retaining Jewish identity and memory against historical trauma. While historically specific, Bak’s work resonates with broader and difficult and moral and ethical issues that continue to bear upon human existence.

Samuel Bak and the Art of Remembrance is presented in cooperation with Pucker Gallery, Boston and supported in part by Barbara & Jim Schaye. Mercedes Sherrod Evans & David L. Evans, and the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation.

Samuel Bak was born on August 12, 1933 in Vilna, Poland at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under first Soviet, then German occupation. While both he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of World War II, he and his mother fled to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp. Here, he was enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School, Munich. Bak’s studies continued as he immigrated to Israel, and he later received a grant to pursue his studies in Paris.

Since 1959, Samuel Bak has had solo exhibitions at private galleries in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Zurich, Rome, and other cities around the world. Numerous large retrospective exhibitions have been held in major museums, universities, and public institutions around the globe.

Publications on Samuel Bak’s work include twelve books, most notably a 400-page monograph entitled Between Worlds, and his touching memoir, Painted in Words. He has also been the subject of two documentary films.