View works. Alicia Melamed-Adams
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Painter Alicia Melamed Adams (née Goldschlag) was born into a Jewish family in Boryslav, in eastern Poland (now Ukraine) in 1927. As a teenager she studied drawing with the Polish-Jewish writer, artist and art teacher Bruno Schulz (later shot by a Nazi officer in 1942). After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, she was the only member of her family to survive after the Jewish population of Drohobycz was forced into a ghetto. In 1946 she met and married fellow survivor Adam Melamed in Warsaw. After two years in Paris, the couple moved to Britain, where she trained at St Martin’s School of Art, and in 1963 painted a series of works recalling her earlier life and the loss of family and childhood friends. These remained hidden in her studio for 20 years before she felt able to exhibit them. She also studied at Sir John Cass School of Art, London, and produced pottery and etchings. In 1965 Melamed Adams became a member of the United Society of Artists with whom she regularly exhibited. She showed in group exhibitions in London, including at Foyles Art Gallery (1984), also across the UK, and twice in Paris, continuing to paint until her eyesight failed. More recently, her work was included in Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain at Ben Uri Gallery in 2017 and in Outlook: No Return. Polish Artists who fled Nazi-dominated Europe to British Culture, at POSK Gallery, London (2019), where she was interviewed by Simon Glass for a BBC London film marking Holocaust Memorial Day. Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Imperial War Museum and Ben Uri Gallery and Museum; both institutions hold her oral testimony.