Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) was an Iraqi-British printmaker and painter whose intaglio practice consistently pursued reduction as a position. Moonshine offers her most pared-down treatment of the night-sky subject. A small pink-red moon hangs alone in a high pale sky; below, a dark crimson band with scattered pink islands suggests sea or floodplain seen from the air. The composition is held in two principal registers and almost no third element. The work draws on a much older European Romantic tradition, the small celestial body in a vast still atmosphere, but her matter-of-fact intaglio surface, deliberately undramatic, refuses sentiment. Moonshine belongs to the strand of her work in which the cosmic and the elemental ground meet with a minimum of incident. Two colours, two planes, one moon. The reduction is the proposition.