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Bar Breaker is one of Baász’s most iconic works, compressing his virtuoso graphic world and his oppositional attitude into one piece of art. Although now famous for his workshops and performances, Imre Baász was primarily a graphic artist. His aim of destroying familiar forms in art is paired with a constant search for new forms. He only kicks the rules if he has news to offer. Bar Breaker dates back to the period right after he moved to Sfântu Gheorghe from Cluj-Napoca. The county first offered him a house in Arcuș/Árkos, a nearby village. This was the period when he discovered objects which later become key elements in his work, like the clapper, the nelson, and the loudspeaker.

Baász almost never chose the actual political situation or oppression specifically as a theme. Even the work entitled File, which depicts the typical layout of the surveillance dossiers made by the Securitate (Departamentul Securității Statului, the secret police of Romania, between 1948 and 1989) to find and target dissidents. The dossier is old, stained, and dirty and the pages are pinned together with a safety pin, which is also one of the key signs of the artist, dominating The Wounds of the Earth series.

Step by Step is a mail artwork from the beginning of the 1980s which Baász made for a Hungarian exhibition. The stamp depicts a pair of legs tied together, which obviously carried ambiguous meanings at the time. Baász made it for the International Mail Art Exhibition curated by Antal Vásárhelyi and organized by the Young Artists’ Association in Budapest in 1984. The work was highly celebrated and published the same year in Élet és Irodalom [Life and Literature], a Hungarian weekly, as an illustration for János Bencze’s article Szabadlábon [At Large]. The artwork provoked a conviction from the Romanian embassy in Budapest and ultimately served as a pretense for the interrogations to which Baász was subjected by the Romanian political police between October 3 and 8, 1984. It was during this interrogation-series that Baász formulated his ars poetica.

Before the fall of the communist regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, performance art appeared only sporadically in basements and in private apartments. The birth of Romanian and Transylvanian performance art is closely linked to the artistic work of Imre Baász. The Burial of the Suitcase is one of the earliest of the very few performances carried out in Romania before 1989. Its message is linked to Chances of Survival, prompting people to discover the possibility of staying in Romania, softly accusing those who had left, but without pointing fingers.

The Chances of Survival is the title of the three preparatory graphics and an installation presented on the first Medium exhibition as an installation. The date of the work is very important. In 1981, people from Transylvania had started leaving Romania due to the worsening living standards and the ethnic harassment suffered by people who belonged to the non-Romanian minority groups.

Baász, who has always been against emigration, thematized this process through his central work. The message was personal and universal at the same time. On one hand, by 1981, most of Baász’s friends had left Romania. On the other, the life of a minority society cannot and should not be compared with the life of the majority society, therefore the minorities should not concentrate on blending in .