Pussy, Aurel Schmidt and Alex Gatenfeld

The Aurel Schmidt Purple Book

a special edtion for Purple Fashion Magazine #13 co-published with Studio Zero

First edtion, Spring 2010
Like new

This book is in stock in our warehouse in the Netherlands and available quickly / Dit boek is op voorraad in ons magazijn in Nederland en snel beschikbaar.

Introduction text from the book written by Alex Gatenfeld:

'In an undated hand-written note reproduced in this book, an adolescent recalls meeting her ideal man. "I don't know at all what he's thinking, but I really don't give a fuck. I don't want to figure him out. I just want him." Maybe Aurel Schmidt is just boasting about her sexual appetite. But maybe, just maybe, she's hinting that she might not be totally fulfilled if she knew exactly what it was she was after. Aurel describes in great detail how the world "vanishes" for her unspoken attraction. Then she makes the most Freudian of slips: listing his inventory of sexual attractions - his face, body, and brain - as his "crudentials." It's important to Aurel that she count the ways she can be crude.

Aurel Schmidt spends a lot of time in her bedroom-cum-studio working on her bold signature figurative drawings - a smiley-face comprising two penises attached at their bases, a facemask formed with a young girl's tossed-off panties. Witness the crudeness of the drawings' scope and references: Morris Louis's late-modernist pours reproduced using menstrual fluid; Arcimboldo's kitschy fruit faces rendered in maggots. Then there's the questionable tastefulness and sophistication of Aurel's bold figurative drawing, and the heart-on-her-sleeve feminism culled from '70s and '80s-era bad punk poetry.

The photographs in this book chronicle Aurel's slow evolution into a sex-doll caricature, a naked bottle-blond with the unshaved armpits and the coke-bottle glasses. Her development has been well documented, and the sexualized image she's made of herself makes it clear that here is a pretty girl with something rather un-pretty underneath. Aurel's subjects are neither models nor the stuff of voyeuristic documentary photography; they're just the artist's friends, who, like the artist, have come to New York in order to make their livelihoods in the arts. And for that, they succumb to the ultimate crudeness: the desire to be looked at.'

Issued as a supplement to Purple Fashion Magazine #13 (Spring Summer 2010)

Concepts and Artworks: Aurel Schmidt
Design: Gianni Oprandi

language: English

Pussy, Aurel Schmidt (photographs) and Alex Gatenfeld, like new
Purple Institute, Spring 2010, first edtion, softcover, 28,4 x 21,0 cm, 68 pages
ISSN: 1766-8832

Price without shipping costs