Maurice Blik, Holocaust Survivor and sculptor in Conversation with Michael Pollak
21 November 2024
It was a privilege to host Maurice, a Holocaust survivor and extremely talented sculptor at Asia House, and listen to his inspirational and incredibly interesting talk.
Maurice Blik was born in Amsterdam in 1939 and has lived in England since being liberated from Bergen Belsen, where he was taken as a small child from his birthplace, Amsterdam. The ability to come to terms with this experience and to confront the face of humanity that he had witnessed, stayed silent in his life for some forty years. It finally found a voice in the passionate and exquisite sculpture which began to emerge in the late 1980s when he created a series of horses’ heads. These noble and benevolent creatures posses an energy and a life force that seem just barely harnessed long enough to take their shape in the clay itself. Later he progressed to more figurative work in which the irrepressible joy of life and the destructive, impenetrable shadow of existence, are held together in a struggling unity