Irene Scheinmann

Irene Scheinmann (1933 to 2023) was an Iraqi-British painter and printmaker, born Irene Reuben-Karady into a Jewish family in Baghdad. She worked from a studio in Richmond, London. She made etchings, monoprints, collagraphs and paintings, and from the turn of the millennium photographs and digital collages. Much of the work shows rock formations, fractured stone and curving horizons.

Scheinmann first worked in fashion in London and Paris. She then studied painting and printmaking in England and France, at Atelier 63 in Paris and with Julian Trevelyan at his Hammersmith studio. She worked mainly in intaglio and developed a collogravure technique. The rocks of Hvasser, an island in southern Norway, were a lasting source. The New Wilderness, a series of paintings and etchings made in response to the Chernobyl disaster, shows cut trees bound with wire fencing. Later works include Genesis I (1996), a two-plate colour etching, and A Landscape (2019), a digital collage.

She was an elected member of Trace, the French printmaking association, and of the California Society of Printmakers. In 1991 she founded the artists' association Print Europe. She held a solo exhibition, Images of Land and Sea, at Camden Galleries, London, in 1990. She showed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1984, 1990 and 1991. In 1995 Ben Uri Gallery, London, gave her a two-person exhibition with the sculptor Dania Appel. Her work is in the Ben Uri Collection, London, and the University of Glasgow. Tabari Artspace describes its 2026 exhibition Fellow Travellers as her first presentation in the Arabic-speaking world.