Samuel Bak is a conceptual artist with elements of post-modernism as he employs different styles and visual vernaculars, i.e. surrealism ("Salvador Dali, René Magritte")", analytical cubism (Picasso), pop art ("Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein)" "and quotations from the old masters. The artist never paints direct scenes of mass death. Instead, he employs allegory, metaphor and certain artistic devices such as substitution: toys instead of the murdered children who played with them, books, instead of the people who read them. Further devices are quotations of iconographical prototypes, i.e. Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" (1511/12) on the Sistine Ceiling or Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving entitled "Melancholia" (1516). In the late 1980s Bak opened up about his paintings, stating they convey "a sense of a world that was shattered."