When the Rainbow Breaks: H O P E in the Art of Samuel Bak

"Common wisdom has it that a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this series of paintings artist Samuel Bak wonders: can a word be worth a thousand pictures? [...] In this series, the letters of the word HOPE appear in various conditions and ambiguous states [...]. For Bak, the work of building hope, or believing in the hope that others offer, requires engaging with the discarded and broken pieces of a previously trusted world now irrevocably shattered by the Holocaust. In landscapes, still lifes, and figural works, Bak gathers the layered elements of hope for us to contemplate and reminds us that they hold within and among them a promise for rebuilding and renewal. At best, hope is a wager of trust embodied in the venture of going forth. In his essay, Henry F. Knight guides us through the multivalent forms of hope in Bak's work, asks us to question what we see and look beyond the visible, endeavors to define what hope after the Holocaust looks like, and teaches us that the process of creation after destruction represented by Bak's work is itself the ultimate act of hope"--Excerpted from dust jacket.