Biography

Irene Scheinmann was born in Baghdad and based in London from the early 1950s, distilling the distance of that passage into her compositions across a trajectory as painter and printmaker. In an ink-hued etching, a moonrise emits an oneiric intensity. In an oil painting, pursed lips trace the contour of a hillside, binding body and terrain along a shared horizon. With a restrained palette, Scheinmann constructs worlds where land and figure incline toward one another, an intimacy in which geology carries emotion and the body absorbs place. Informed by the modernist vocabularies she encountered in Europe and imprinted with the experience of diasporic passage, her practice engages the natural world as a site through which to articulate longing, rupture and imagined journey.