Irene Scheinmann was born into a Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq in 1933 and studied painting and printmaking in England and France, working with Julian Trevelyan in London and at Atelier 63 in Paris. An elected member of Trace, the French printmaking association, and of the California Society of Printmakers, she founded Print Europe in 1991 and in 1993 she was a member of the Ben Uri Arts Committee. Her work as a printmaker and a painter is deeply inspired by landscape.
Painter and printmaker, Irene Scheinmann (née Irene Reuben-Karady) was born into a Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq in 1933. She studied painting and printmaking in England and France, working with Julian Trevelyan at his Hammersmith studio in west London and at Atelier 63 in Paris. An elected member of Trace, the French Printmaking Association, and of the California Society of Printmakers, Scheinmann also founded the European artist's association, Print Europe in 1991.
As a progressive printmaker, Scheinmann works mainly in intaglio techniques but has also developed a collogravure technique. She has also experimented with photography and digital collage. Her work is deeply inspired by landscapes and the human figure. The rock formations on the island of Hvasser in southern Norway are a great source of inspiration, the indentations and fractures in the rocks suggesting new visions which she then translates into her art.
Scheinmann has exhibited widely within the UK, as well as within continental Europe, the USA and the Far East. In London her work has been included in US-UK Print Connection at the Barbican Centre (1989), an international exchange exhibition of the Californian Society of Printmakers, the Los Angeles Printmaking Society and the Printmakers Council of Great Britain. In 1990 she held a solo show, Images of Land and Sea at the Camden Galleries, featuring paintings, etchings and monoprints inspired by the monumental megaliths erected by prehistoric man in Brittany and Ireland. The Jewish Chronicle art critic Barry Fealdman (also Ben Uri's secretary) described her as a ‘visionary artist’ whose paintings ‘are rich in surface texture, lending the massive stones she depicts a solidity and an immediacy that are very real’. He also praised the technical expertise she employed in her etchings, characterised by an ‘aura of mystery’ and ‘some very intriguing textural effects’ (Fealdman 1990, p. 18). In 1991 she arranged the exhibition Print Europe at the Concourse Gallery, Barbican Centre, part of which was devoted to the work of Stanley William Hayter whose Parisian printmaking workshop, Atelier 17, was important to generations of European printmakers. In 1993 she was included in Ben Uri’s Towards 2000, an exhibition inspired by the approaching millennium, featuring 20 British and 20 Israeli printmakers, the same year in which she was a member of the Ben Uri Arts Committee. Two years later she held a joint exhibition, Irene Scheinmann (paintings, prints and mixed media works), Dania Appel (sculptures) at Ben Uri, showcasing works based on the images of the destruction that she saw wrought on her native land during the Gulf War. The show also included a series of paintings and etchings entitled The New Wilderness, previously exhibited at the Karelian State Museum, Russia. These depicted trees with severed trunks and branches, entwined with wire fencing, which had taken on a grandeur and significance in the wide, deserted landscape in which they stood. The power of the composition was complemented by the rich, dark texture which she achieved through the use of paint, collagraph and deep-bite etchings. Three etchings from the series were subsequently presented to the Ben Uri Collection. Scheinmann also contributed work to the Royal Academy summer exhibitions in 1984, 1990 and 1991, to the National Print Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London (1995, 1996) and the Contemporary Print Show, Barbican Centre, London (1999).
Irene Scheinmann's work is represented in the UK public domain in the Ben Uri Collection, the collection of the Radcliffe Infirmary, University of Oxford, and Glasgow University.
Irene Scheinmann in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Irene Scheinmann]
Publications related to [Irene Scheinmann] in the Ben Uri Library