Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) was a painter and printmaker whose practice held the cosmic and the bodily within a continuous frame of attention. Lunar Vistas extends that project into a wider, more cosmological frame than her single-moon prints of the early 1980s. Four moons of varying size float across a star-dense night sky above a band of purple hills and a foreground of dotted, snow-white forms that read as both landscape and reclining bodies. Her confidence with the two-colour intaglio process is at its fullest here: the print captures two distinct registers of light, the deep ink of the sky and the high white of the foreground, without losing the textural density that gives her plates their characteristic surface. Scheinmann would speak in later years of using digital tools to explore ‘the infinite space of the universe,’ a concern already declared in this print fourteen years earlier.