Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) was a painter and printmaker who held the figure and the land within a single frame of attention across more than four decades of practice. In Encounter , two boulders sit on green ground beneath a pale lilac horizon, the smaller leaning slightly toward the larger as if in conversation. The lilac, mauve and rose palette belongs to a continuous chromatic vocabulary across her work of the early 1980s, drawn from her observations of the West Coast of Ireland and from the rock formations of Hvasser, the small Norwegian island where she frequently worked. The brushwork is restrained, the rocks modelled in blocks of warm and cool violet that read as much like draped or crouched bodies as they do like geological forms. Scheinmann’s abiding proposition was that the body is absorbed into place, and that place is inflected by the body. This painting is a statement of that position.