Many Sephardic Jews of Spain were forced to leave their homes as early as the end of the 15th century when the Inquisition gained ground in the country. As they fled Spain, they locked the door of their homes and took the key with them. Until this day the key is handed down from generation to generation as a symbol of the real home that the Sephardic Jews were forced to leave back then. This leaves each generation with hope that one day it will be possible to un-lock the doors to their real home again and helps preserve the memory of their cultural herit-age and tribal history.

In one form or another, angels appear in all religions. The revelation of the angel always arouses hope. It signifies the promise that sooner or later even the deepest darkness will dissipate and the pain will subside. Angels visit abandoned cities, places of gruesome massacres, escort souls to the afterlife and subdue the pain of loss.

The tree is one of the most archaic symbols in the world, linking ancient religions. The tree of life connects three worlds: the roots reach the underworld (ancestral world), the trunk grows in the earthly world, and the branches reach the sky. In the Bible, the story of the first man begins with the tree in the Garden of Eden on which the forbidden fruit grew. In his artwork, Bak de-picts trees with transportable roots, symbolising a person who is forced to leave his homeland and thus ‘packs’ their roots and takes them to another place. It is a sad but hopeful symbol, a reminder that in fact all we need is already inside us.

Samuel Bak started creating the Chess series after the death of his stepfather Nathan Markowski and dedicated it to the man who replaced his father. Markowski started taking care of the boy and his mother shortly after World War II, when they ended up in a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany. It was his stepfather who taught Bak to play chess and explained the rules of the game. In the eyes of the artist, rational and thoughtful moves are associated with the order of a structured life, and a chess board is a symbol of a platform for the ‘game’ of life.

The most hopeful moment for the gambler is the second before the dice are rolled, which Samuel Bak often identifies as an opportunity that could determine our destiny. It not only refers to the success of the gambler in a gambling game, but also to the successful move in life in the figurative sense of the word. We are all making choices all the time about where to study, where to travel or where to stay. The dice for the artist symbolises both blind success and the success determined by us.

Samuel Bak calls the creative process a totality of desires, thoughts and ideas that need to be decomposed, ‘broken down’ and then put back into a universe, the difference being that it will bear a different form – the kind that is born in the artist’s imagination. Many of his still lifes are an attempt to visualise a non-existent but extremely precious world of the past that can be ‘resurrected’ in artwork.

Samuel Bak is a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan. He lived in Israel, France, Italy, and Switzerland. Eventually Bak settled in the United States of America. The artist has many warm and painful memories associated with his hometown Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. When asked where he comes from, he always answers: Ich bin a Vilner (‘I am from Vilnius’ in Yiddish). And it is the good memories of childhood, like an anchor, that connect the artist with Vilnius, his spiritual homeland, an integral part of his identity.

In Judaism there is a concept "tikkun olam", which means an attempt to recover, to correct the world. This concept is examined in the series "Adam and Eve". Bak asks rhetorically what it would have been like if both his parents had survived the Holocaust. Would they have tried to ‘fix’ their world, to glue it back together? While hoping for it, the artist also doubts it. The lodge-like pear glued back together from pieces and set to become a temporary home doesn’t seem to last long. Bak asks himself and each of us: are our hopes reasonable?