Maneater

Maneater collects five years of Aurel Schmidt's obsessively worked colored-pencil and graphite drawings, in which discarded fast food, cigarette butts, insects, and tangled vegetation accumulate into dense, corrosive images of the body under pressure.

The book brings together drawings shown across Schmidt's solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects in New York and Peres Projects in Los Angeles, alongside work exhibited at the DESTE Foundation in Athens, including the cigarette-burned faces of her Burnouts series. Text by curator Kathy Grayson accompanies the plates in this 160-page softcover.

Schmidt, born in Kelowna, Canada, in 1982, works in a self-taught, densely layered style that reworks the vanitas tradition through a punk and pop sensibility, rendering rot and decay with the patience usually reserved for still-life painting; Maneater remains her fullest survey in book form.