Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023), Iraqi-born and resident in Britain from the early 1950s, was a painter and printmaker whose practice held landscape as a record of duration far beyond the human. Primeval Night turns the dotted aquatint technique of her 1983 work to a wider and less specifically figural subject than the lunar prints of the same year. A range of dark blue mountains rolls across the lower two-thirds of the plate beneath a star-flecked sky, the whole composition built almost entirely from small white dots laid over a single deeply bitten ground. The mountains soften and rise in waves rather than peaks, their contours suggesting the slow sediment of geological time more than any specific topography. The entire surface is luminous, the entire surface is night. The technical virtuosity lies in producing this evenness of light from a process, intaglio, historically associated with darkness and incision.