A selection from our personal bookshelf: Aurel Schmidt – Burn Outs | 2007
Published by TV Books
32 pages
21,6 × 21,6 cm
#Outofstock
Deitch Projects presented a one-night exhibition and book release for a new body of works by Aurel Schmidt. Ms. Schmidt created thirteen drawings using cigarettes burns, pencil, acrylic, colored pencil, and even blood to create unique and disturbing faces.
In this series, Ms. Schmidt’s pieces focused on the gross, neglected, or overlooked objects of daily life: the visceral, the sexual, the shameful, and the profane. Using an iconic Mr. Smiley simple face as a jumping-off point, Ms. Schmidt made eyes out of toilet paper rolls, a nose from Band-Aids and blood, and a mouth of discarded banana peel. A bloody tampon delineated the nose of Pretty, whose soft blush only threw her red nose into starker relief. Lynda, an homage to Lynda Benglis, the iconic ‘80s feminist artist who posed with a big dildo, who here grinned a big pink double-dong. Sniffy’s jaggedly intense grin was explained by the two rolled up bills he has as a nose; Musk’s bewildered mask of (inferably) odoriferous panties helped explain his or her perplexed little gasp of a mouth; an unpleasant cocktail of prescription pills seemed to have caused the intense, blank anguish of Push N Turn’s burned mouth; and Boo Boo seemed a gung-ho lad who, despite a band-aided bleeding nose, smiled optimistically.
Aurel used similar imagery in her previous works of aggregate faces and beings made of junk from the gutter– “Archimboldo portraits” where, instead of using vegetables, humans were formed by discarded hamburgers, condoms, used q-tips, maggots, dead birds, lo mein, cocaine, cockroaches, and the grimiest of New York trash, the New York Post. Ranging from as large as a six-foot self-portrait to a six-inch drawing of houseflies, her work took an unromantic view of nature and coupled it with the loving exactitude of an eighteenth-century Naturalist artist.
Born in Kamloops, Canada, this 25-year-old artist was included in the DESTE Museum in Athens’ exhibition, Fractured Figure. Aurel’s work was also included in Delirium in Melting, a solo show at The Gallery at Adventure Ecology HQ in London. She presented her first New York solo exhibition at Deitch Projects the following year.
A catalogue produced by TV Books with support from Deitch Projects accompanied this exhibition, with essay by Anne Lesley Selcer. (From Deitch Projects)
