This is the first volume on the paintings of acclaimed Canadian-born, Portland-based painter Sascha Braunig (born 1983), whose brightly rendered, optically contorted bodies and heads seem to turn on themselves and on their settings.

In dreamlike scenes, where repetition and patterning are foregrounded, Braunig’s figures emit an extrasensory glow: flaring with reflected color, they are iridescent beings whose very skin seems to be a source of psychic power.

On the occasion of her 2016–17 show at MoMA PS1, curator Peter Eleey wrote: Drawing inspiration from the distorted bodies that litter the histories of modern painting, Braunig adapts these legacies to the discomforts and instabilities of contemporary life … While evocatively dystopic, her paintings also subtly empower their vulnerable subjects, advocating a humanist art for an age in which individual experience seems threatened by forces beyond our control.