In the Beginning: The Artist Samuel Bak

We are pleased to announce the extension of our inaugural show, In the Beginning: The Artist Samuel Bak, now through July 16. The exhibition features over fifty works that explore Bak’s artistic career from his watercolors done in the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp in Landsberg, Germany, to his most recent paintings. He curated this selection of works to showcase his gift of over five hundred works to the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

The inaugural exhibition, In the Beginning: The Artist Samuel Bak, offers a chronological and thematic selection of Bak’s paintings and drawings from 1946 through 2022. The artist selected these works from the five hundred pieces he has gifted to the University to showcase the arc of his artistic career over eight decades.

The exhibition features watercolors and drawings done in the Vilna ghetto during the Nazi occupation of the city, abstract works from the sixties, and his renowned metaphysical paintings. Bak’s work weaves together personal and Jewish histories through a series of layered metaphors to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience.

His art depicts a world destroyed, and yet provisionally pieced back together, preserving the 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. This exhibition is a testament to the artist’s relentless wrestling with the legacy of the Holocaust and continued questioning of humankind’s propensity to violence.