Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) began her formal training in painting at Regent Street Polytechnic, and On the Brink dates from the period in which she was working through the languages of late European modernism. The canvas presents a reclining figure in a manner that owes a considered debt to cubist painting and to the early Hockney generation she would have encountered in 1970s London: a body broken into planes of ochre, scarlet, royal blue and ivory, set against a flat field of midnight blue. The figure is at rest but the title insists on the contrary, and the composition’s tension between repose and fracture is asserted by the way the limbs and torso refuse to settle into a single coherent volume. The painting documents the analytic, formal grounding that would later allow Scheinmann to compress the body into a single line or curve in her mature work; here, the body is still being taken apart. It also suggests her commitment to figuration at a moment when much of British printmaking and painting was moving toward pure abstraction.