Representing the Irreparable

"The art of Samuel Bak entrances. It also disquiets. The subject matter of Bak's painting is anything but easy. Bak weaves together personal history and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Across nearly seven decades of artistic production Samuel Bak has explored and reworked a set of metaphors, a visual grammar, and a vocabulary that ultimately privileges questions. His revisions of Genesis stories, as well as of New Testament motifs of crucifixion and apocalypse, defamiliarize these texts and our conventional ways of reading them. For readers of the Bible, whether scholar or lay, the juxtaposition of ancient sacred story with modern suffering story challenges us to see the biblical text in a different light, illumined both by the light of reason and the glow of crematoria furnaces. Samuel Bak preserves memory of the twentieth century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit."--BOOK JACKET.