Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023), painter and printmaker, was born in Baghdad and lived in London from the early 1950s. Her late painting compressed the human body and the open landscape into a single formal proposition. Lip Power II is among the most reduced of these compositions. A pair of closed lips occupies the lower third of the canvas at the meeting line of a sandy upper ground and a teal-green lower ground; a soft pyramidal column descends from the top of the picture to the upper lip, suggesting the bridge of a nose dissolving into pure light. The granular surface, applied in the dense pointillist texture characteristic of her late painting, refutes smooth illusionism. The lips become a horizon line in their own right; the body becomes the landscape it surveys. The work makes literal a long thread in Scheinmann’s practice in which figure and place are formally identical, and in which the act of speaking, or of withholding speech, is staged at the scale of geography.