We are all composed of all that we have met. This phrase well applies to the life and art of Samuel Bak. Before settling in the Boston area, he had lived in 16 different places. His art serves as a commentary on his life and his Journey.

Samuel Bak's exhibition, Figuring Out: New Work by Samuel Bak will be on view at Pucker Gallery from 4 March through 24 April 2022.

Dr. Celinscak is a historian of twentieth century Britain and Europe, specializing in war, Holocaust, and genocide studies. He is the author of Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, winner of the Vine Award for Non-Fiction, and Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust. He is also the co-editor of Artistic Representations of Suffering: Rights, Resistance, and Remembrance and International Approaches to Holocaust Studies (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).

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.

In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. In 1961, he was invited to exhibit at the "Carnegie International" in Pittsburgh. And, in 1963 two one-man exhibitions were held at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums. It was subsequent to these exhibitions, during the years 1963-1964, that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstract forms to a metaphysical figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language.

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.

Since Pucker Gallery’s establishment in 1967, Gallery Owner and Director Bernie Pucker and his wife, Sue, have expanded the collection to include artists from New England and around the globe, exhibiting a breadth of both 2D and 3D fine art. The gallery has exhibited Samuel Bak's work since 1969