Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) was an Iraqi-British painter whose late work compressed parts of the human body and the open landscape into a single formal proposition. Lip Power I is the warmer chromatic register of that project. The closed mouth is set across the meeting line of a sandy upper ground and a deep magenta lower ground; a paler, peach-toned column descends from the top of the canvas to settle on the upper lip, completing what reads as a face fading upward into light. The granular pointillist surface is built up in a coarse, almost mineral texture that resists any reading of the lips as cosmetic or decorative. They are landscape features. The central proposition of Scheinmann’s late painting was that the parts of the body that we treat as most expressive of identity, the mouth, the curve of a hip, the line of a shoulder, share their formal language with the land. The body is a place, and is read with the same attention.