Alice Berger-Hammerschlag

Alice Berger Hammerschlag née Berger (18 February 1917 – 14 July 1969) was an Austrian artist. She settled in Belfast and while creating abstract paintings also had a number of creative and administrative roles in Northern Ireland.

Biography Hammerschlag was born in Vienna and studied art between 1929 and 1938 under Franz Cižek at the Kunstgewerbeschule and at the Vienna Academy of Arts. In 1938 she moved to Belfast, as a refugee on a British government permit for graphic designers, to avoid persecution under the Nazi regime. Her older sister, Trudi, came to Britain with her, but the two appear to have led separate lives once in the UK, with Trudi becoming a linguist and teacher, eventually leading a team at York University in its Language Centre.

In Northern Ireland Hammerschlag did design work for commercial publishers and, later, designed theatre sets for the Lyric Theatre Belfast, where she worked alongside, and became a close friend of, the choreographer and Holocaust survivor, Helen Lewis. In 1941 the Ulster Academy of Arts published a portfolio of her lithographs in aid of the Ulster Hospital for Children and Women. Hammerschlag was active in the running of the Lyric's New Gallery in Belfast and in 1959 had her first solo exhibition at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London. She participated in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art at Belfast in 1955. She also showed with the Living Art Exhibition in 1961, and between 1964 and 1967 inclusive. She also had exhibitions in Europe and the United States, at the United Nations, Rome in 1963, at the Ulster Office, London in 1966, the Gallery Creuze, Paris in 1967, and in 1968 and 1969 at the Salon International in Cannes. CEMA also hosted Hammerschlag's work in their Chicester Street Gallery in 1962 where her paintings included a series based on W. B. Yeats' The Death of Cuchulain.

Hammerschlag was a member of the Women's International Art Club and the Free Painters and Sculptors. Her early paintings were abstract works and she remained an abstract artist throughout her career but increasingly included more overtly rhythmic patterns in her work.