‘Creativity born out of lack’ is how Fred Pollack names his work during an interview. Art with a tarnished past. Fred Pollack was born in Enschede on 11 April 1943, by which time his father had already been gassed in Auschwitz, his mother dying some time later in Bergen Belsen from exhaustion. The little orphan is taken in by a foster family and, when he is about five years old, finds out that these parents are not his real parents. ‘From then on, I found myself in a different arena,’ Fred recounts.

Instead of becoming a tailor, he gets the chance to become a physician psychiatrist. He settles in the Groningen town of Garnwerd. There, Fred further develops into a versatile artist, in whom painting is intuitive. ‘In a resistance to limitations and in a desire for liberation from bonds that have been knowingly put in place or fixed by whatever cause’ quote Erik Slagter, 2005. Or as he himself writes on one note: ‘A painting does not tell a story about reality; but represents a reality itself’. On other notes: ‘Imagining not depicting’ and ‘Life is the plural of guts’. After 20 years of Parkinson's, Fred Pollack died on 1 December 2022 as a result of corona.