About

The artist Iris Anne Berger was born in London and educated at Camberwell College of Art, London, and Reading University. At Camberwell she was influenced by her teacher Martin Bloch, an Anglo German expressionist painter who was a student of Lovis Corinth. From the mid nineteen fifties until the nineteen eighties, Iris has combined her own painting projects with lecturing work. From the nineteen eighties to the present time, Iris has been working exclusively on her own projects.

Throughout her life, Iris has been concerned with issues of subjugation and suffering, both past and present. As a young art student in the London of the 1950’s, her commitment to fighting oppression led her to collaborate with political activist and journalist Claudia Jones, founder of Britain’s first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette. In 1959, 24 year old Iris designed the wall mural celebrating West Indian life for the premises of the West Indian Gazette in Brixton. In January 1959, Iris created floral stage installations for the UK’s first West Indian Carnival held at St. Pancras Town Hall which was nationally televised by the BBC. This carnival, organized by Claudia Jones, is one of the precursors of the Nottinghill Carnival.

The thematic unity of Iris’ work from the 1950’s onwards clusters around hope, despair, and suffering, through the plight of refugees, environmental disaster and the socio-economic contradictions cleaving modern identity and social conscience, in particular in relation to consumerism, social injustice and poverty. At the heart of these works is the problem of the ‘passive spectator’, who feels deeply but simply looks on or who turns away, disoriented by what seem to be the overwhelming nature of macro-forces. Iris’s art confronts these problems by asking the spectator to question their own sense of responsibility to society, their community and the future.

Iris’ art reflects her commitment to the values of diversity and inclusivity. From 2017, Iris has been working on a project about fluid identities, and has produced a series of paintings concerned with transgender and pangender experiences.

Iris’ art seeks to transcend the context of her own private experiences, to engage with, and to incorporate, the experiences of others which have impacted on her life during the turbulent history of the twentieth century and our own. This is especially so in the series of paintings entitled ‘Aftermath’, which are concerned with the humanitarian consequences of disaster; also in the Refugee Series, and in the Anne Frank Series. In these series Iris expressionistically represents the temporal experiences of human subjectivity through ‘memory’, ‘anticipation’, ‘despair’, ‘fear’, and ‘hope’. Her paintings strive to capture the dynamic relations between hope and despair in human life. In 2009, Iris was the UK’s representative at the International Group Exhibition in Budapest marking 80 years since the birth of Anne Frank.

Iris Berger’s repertoire is wide: fluid identity; transgender and pangender experiences; fractured consciousness and modernity; chaos; human made/environmental disaster; Anne Frank and the Holocaust (artandannefrank.co.uk); refugees; still-life: processes of decay and patterns in apples; flowers and landscapes; Korean and Chinese paintings with synthesized images of ancient myth and modern, urban landscape.