The Director of Gallery 4463 will deliver a talk on the legacy and traditions in art, exemplified in the works of Bronislaw and Hedi Bak of the Studio 22 workshop.

The program is Thursday, May 15th at 7:30 pm at the Gallery 4463, 4463 Cherokee Ave. Acworth, GA 30101

Bronislaw and Hedi Bak were European trained artists, who studied in Germany. After the war, there was a time of resurgence of the arts by survivors who had been driven into exile, drafted into Hitler’s war machine or imprisoned for who they were or what they believed. Reaching back 20 years to the heady days of the Bauhaus and other great art movements of the 1920s, the artists married crafts and esthetics in an effort to recreate an environment where art and creativity was free and unshackled. Immigrating to the US in the 1950’s they brought with them the energy and passion for community based arts.

This talk will be given in conjunction with a display of limited edition books featuring etchings, woodcuts and other media from the mid-60’s workshop that produced hundreds of hand pulled graphics including works by Bronislaw and Hedi Bak, principal owners of Studio 22. This special exhibition includes their original woodcuts and etchings, tools, woodblocks, and an informative video of Bronislaw discussing his works and life experiences. Bronislaw is included in the Encyclopedia Britannica and has his woodblock prints in the Library of Congress, Carnegie Institute, and Gutenberg Museum in Germany and in collections throughout the world. His entire “100 Views of Chicago” is available on-line in the collections section of the Art Institute of Chicago website.

As a young man, Clemens Bak, 57, worked in his parent’s studios in Chicago. He left to pursue a 25 year career in manufacturing, returning to the world of art as an artist representative and biographer of Bronislaw Bak in the 1980’s. In 1991, ten years after the artist’s death, he traveled to Europe and interviewed artists from his father’s class and generation. Working with the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum he organized a traveling exhibit of nearly 100 works from the family collection. In 2000, a major retrospective of Bronislaw Back’s paintings and graphics was shown in Minnesota, site of his largest and most famous work, the 17,000 sq. ft. stained glass window in St. John’s Abbey Church near St. Cloud. Selected views of this work can be seen at:

http://www.employees.csbsju.edu/idommer/Church/Window.htm