Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) was a painter and printmaker working in London whose mature practice centred on the elemental landscape as a vehicle for thinking through human survival and loss. Dance of Life belongs to the body of work she made in the years following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, but turns toward a more lyrical statement of survival than the bleaker prints of the same period. A central tree, its trunk and two upraised branches almost figural, rises from a plum-coloured plain under a sky of dusk blue. Around it stand the broken stumps and short verticals that recur across her work of these years, here reduced to a scattered company rather than an army. The roads or roots extending from the lower edge of the canvas pull the viewer toward the tree, which retains the gesture of a body raising its arms. The composition is captured in a narrow tonal range of blue, mauve and rose, the matte oil surface worked to a fine grain that resembles the dotted aquatint of her etchings.