Literature

Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023) was an Iraqi-British painter and printmaker whose practice consistently held the figure and the land within a single formal language. Curvature belongs to the mid-1990s body of work in which a single curving form becomes the subject of the whole canvas. The composition is near-square, in lilac and ash blue, the surface heavily worked into a granular, mineral texture that registers the influence of her printmaking on her painting: pigment scraped, layered and rebuilt rather than brushed. A long S-curve descends from upper right to lower left, rounded over a body of paler ground. The form refuses identification: it could be a hip, a dune, the shoulder of a hill, a rock seen at close range. Scheinmann had spoken of being drawn to the indentations and fractures in the rock formations of Hvasser, the small Norwegian island where she often worked, and the curve here belongs to that family of attention. The body is a place, and the place is held to the body.