Jonasz Stern’s work is deeply connected to the artist’s experiences during the Second World War. After Lviv was occupied by the Germans, he was confined to the ghetto. He was sent to the Belzec death camp, but managed to escape and return to Lviv. In 1943, he miraculously escaped death: the bullet of a firing squad missed him and he managed to hide among the bodies of the murdered.

Bones first appeared in Stern’s work around 1964. At that time he was working with the art movement known as Matter Painting, which had interested him since the early 1960s. Of his compositions using bones, he said: ‘In the meadows and highlands of the Tatra foothills, I find animal bones with which the highlanders litter the environment. I treat these bones as a kind of survival of these creatures . . . .’ Critics have noted the colour and composition of the paintings from this period, which contrast with their tragic message — a reference to the Holocaust. In 1972 the artist explained: ‘My compositions of killed forms make us aware that we are Cains every day.’