Bøger udgivet af Pucker Gallery,US

This book features 125 early paintings artist Samuel Bak made as a child prodigy in the Vilna Ghetto, works created throughout his early career, and paintings from the 21st-century.

"Candles have a ceremonial history in Judaism where their lighting accompanies holy days and is a ritualistic remembrance of loved ones who have passed. Additionally, the Ner Tamid, or Eternal Light, perpetually burns in the synagogue to represent the constant presence of God. The significance of the candle falters and the divine light dims, however, in the shadows cast by murderous world wars and numerous genocidal campaigns. This leads us to ask: what ritual of memorialization can possibly befit those who died in this way? How do we address the destructive nature of flames, manifested in the Greek etymology of the word Holocaust, in which holos means "whole" and kaustos denotes "burn," and by which everything is reduced to ash? In his essay, Lawrence L. Langer guides us through the ritual of remembering the Holocaust through Samuel Bak's paintings. Langer's words explicate the historical, religious, and cultural narratives that inform the artwork. As Langer turns our sight into insight, he unpacks the dense visual imagery of each work, verbalizes the inquiries both overt and covert, and provides the context that scaffolds our attempts to find answers. Inhabitants of a surrealistic space, Bak's candles are abused, damaged, melting, lifeless, and bathed in the somber afterglow of profound sorrow. The cylindrical candles morph into tree trunks, logs, chimneys, columns, missiles and other projectiles, exposing the frequent disorder at the heart of the supposed orderly progression of history. Amidst the anguish of his paintings, Bak allows for the notion that life can rise anew. If his visual universe is not saturated with emblems of hope, it certainly does not fall victim to despair. There is an instinctive need to restore to the candle the memory of its sanctified role"--

In this series of paintings and drawings, Lady Just Is appears in varying conditions, poses, and garbs juxtaposed with familiar biblical and secular symbols of covenant in states of ruination: faded and cobbled rainbows, disintegrating Mosaic tablets of law, unblinking and stony eyes, sagging and unkempt blindfolds, defunct and imbalanced scales.

Considers the hidden dialogue of generations, with the secret entanglement of different ages. It is indeed a playful cycle, whose playfulness, and even parody, becomes apparent to the beholder literate in Jewish memory and religious imagination. Bak's images are replete with allusions, citations, intimate references, playing with themes that are as intuitive as they are rooted in Jewish tradition.

A mobile artist, Mark Davis was drawn to the act of creating as a young boy. The discovery of Alexander Calder's work had a deep influence on Davis's early work, and has had a consistent presence throughout his career. In this lavishly illustrated volume, plants, animals, humans, and landscapes develop within the brightly colored and abstracted shapes that make up Davis's body of work today.

In his latest series of paintings featuring images of cups, Samuel Bak proves once again that he is a master of the collapsing visual metaphor. Bak's art and the questions he raises are important for viewers today because he is overtly concerned with matters both of his own personal experience and those of the larger human condition.

An examination of Samuel Bak's collection of paintings. It describes Bak's art that 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.

Showcases the distinctive work of one of the most innovative artists. Samuel Bak's series of paintings, ""New Perceptions of Old Appearances"", is a tribute to the power of the metaphorical imagination. In this book - filled with color illustrations - the author shows the versatility and uniqueness of Bak's art.

The art of Samuel Bak depicts a world destroyed and yet provisionally pieced back together. Across nearly seven decades of artistic production Samuel Bak has explored and reworked a set of metaphors, a visual grammar and vocabulary, that ultimately privileges questions.

Bak's journey was marked by memories and profound sadness and an awareness of his responsibility to express the spirits of all who were destroyed during the Holocaust. This book aims to pay tribute to the artist's return to his birthplace, to the place of his childhood; to streets of his tenuous survival during World War II.