Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023), an Iraqi-born artist who lived and worked in Britain, developed a mature painting practice in the 1990s in which the surface of the rock and the line at which one substance meets another became a primary subject. Fracture I belongs to that strand of her work. The square canvas is divided diagonally between a pink-and-mauve ground above and a slate blue below, the two meeting along a torn, jagged seam that runs the full width of the painting. The whole surface is built up in a coarse, granular texture: pigment loaded onto the canvas in a manner that registers sand, stone or weathered concrete more readily than paint, returning the eye to her long preoccupation with the indentations and fractures of natural rock. The fracture is the subject. Two bodies of material, pressed against one another, neither fully integrated nor fully separable. The composition has the directness of a photographic close-up while retaining the haptic, slowly built surface of her studio practice.