Objects & Objectification

Stein’s paintings present figures and things that hover between the fetishistic and the familiar: a latex-coated torso, a gloved hand steadying a needle, padded beings locked in a tender, uncanny embrace. These bodies — gleaming, distorted, half-humanoid — resist simple readability. They become objects among objects, containers for tension, desire, control and surrender.

The work moves through registers of intimacy and distance. The surface of a slick suit becomes an archive for touch; the padded, cartoonish figures clinging to each other store tenderness like heat inside synthetic fibers. Even the black swimming cats drifting below the surface hold a secret mnemonic charge: snapshots of an impossible moment that painting alone can fix in place.

The Painting as Archive

Threaded through this charged object-world is an older truth: painting, unlike a video file or a plastic toy, does not easily vanish.
Long before obsolete VHS tapes hissed into silence, before cloud servers corrupted family albums overnight, pigment held images safe for 40,000 years — from the handprints of Paleolithic caves to oil slicks on canvas today.

Stein’s paintings grasp this persistence like a lifeline. Each canvas is a contradiction: fetishized surface, yet relic; hypermodern subject, yet ancient method. The brushstroke becomes a rebellious act of saving — an analog storage device for moments that the digital age would chew up and discard.

Love and Relationships in an Unstable World

Inside these lacquered bodies and synthetic lovers flickers a quiet urgency: what do we rescue when the world insists we forget? The padded lovers cling to one another like archival bundles; their embrace is both armor and wound. They speak of connection made monstrous or tender under the pressures of technological mediation, pandemic isolation, ecological fracture.

Their shiny skins hint at intimacy’s vulnerability: everything soft encased in something impermeable, everything real made frictionless, everything at risk of becoming a commodity or a ghost.

A Quiet Refusal to Lose

Everything not saved will be lost is not only a warning — it is Stein’s subtle refusal. In paintings that slip between the hyperreal and the speculative, she holds fast to the image as memory’s last shelter. These figures and objects do not plead for rescue; they are the rescue: an insistence that some things — the pressure of a hand, the tremor of skin under latex, the simple fact of an embrace — must be stored somewhere durable enough to outlast our short attention spans.

The cave walls of our time are these canvases — flickering with synthetic bodies that demand we keep looking, keep remembering, keep saving.

About the artist

Charlie Stein (b. Berlin) lives and works in Berlin. Her practice moves between painting, digital culture and sculptural installations, exploring the uneasy promises of intimacy and the fragile architectures of modern desire. She currently combines her artistic practice with teaching painting and drawing at HfBK Hamburg and has been a visiting professor at CalArts, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Stein has participated in national and international exhibitions, such as Manifesta 11, Sinopale, the Bingen Sculpture Triennial, as well as exhibitions in museums across Europe and Asia. Her work has also been included in the ISCP x Almine Rech benefit auction.

With a background in sociology and fine arts, Stein explores transitions between physical and virtual space, between craft and machine, and between individual and systemic structures. Her practice operates at the intersection of contemporary art, technology, and critical theory. She addresses themes such as corporeality, intimacy, digital surrealism, and digital aesthetics, working in painting, installation, text, and AI-based collaborations.