Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023), Iraqi-born and resident in London from the early 1950s, developed a series of intaglio prints in 1983 that opened her practice toward a cosmological scale. Lunar III is the most compositionally dramatic of those works, abandoning the moon as a discrete object and instead saturating the entire upper field with a dense purple sky scattered with white. The lower two-thirds of the plate is given over to a range of mauve and ochre hills, modelled through her accumulated dotted aquatint into a stippled, pointillist surface that resembles weathered desert as much as it does landscape under moonlight. There is no longer a single celestial body to anchor the eye; the entire night has become luminous. The formal achievement of the print is the way colour is built up across two plates without ever resolving into outlined form: everything in Lunar III is texture, density and pressure of mark.