In her first solo exhibition in New York, the artist speaks with Gabriella Angeleti about AI, abstraction, and the sociological roots of her practice.
The Berlin-based artist Charlie Stein explores the entanglement of the physical and digital worlds in her practice. Stein’s first solo exhibition in New York, Almost Human, at the newly inaugurated Lohaus Sominsky Gallery in Tribeca, features a selection of paintings from the past two years that examine the shifting boundaries between those realities. While her broader practice includes conceptual and sculptural works such as Safe Playground (2020)—a surreal outdoor sculpture where a flattened slide embodies the loss that comes with overprotection—this exhibition intentionally returns to painting as her primary language.
Stein trained in fine art at the State Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied with Christian Jankowski, Rainer Ganahl, and Gerhard Merz in Munich and Stuttgart, with additional studies in social sciences. She has exhibited widely across Europe, including at Manifesta 11 in 2016 and at the Kunsthalle II Mallorca this year. She has also taught and undertaken residencies at institutions such as ISCP New York, CalArts, the Pratt Institute, and the Berlin University of the Arts. In this interview on the heels of the opening of the exhibition, Stein discusses her process and the works on view in her New York debut.
Gabriella Angeleti: The exhibition title, Almost Human, suggests a tension between the human and the artificial. What does it mean?
Charlie Stein: This is a moment where we’re questioning how human AI is, what will happen to humanity and how to interact with each other. The question about what it means to be human is being completely revisited because we’re not sure what it means. People talk about intelligence, but what they really mean is: “Can something emulate being human?” How are we surprised that a machine acts human when we feed it things like Shakespeare, Hannah Arendt, or Reddit forums? We want to make AI into this alien force, but it’s just a brain that we have fed all this information to. For me, it’s like, what does a human in our time do? How do we identify our own humanity in the interactions we have daily? I feel Almost Human is a beautiful title that encapsulates all of this. It’s very open.
GA: Your work has evolved significantly over the years, from hybrid robot-human portraits to the more complex figures we see now. What shifted for you artistically or conceptually?
CS: The body of work that you look at now came from the idea of moving away from figuration that depicted things that somewhat look like they’re in the real world. When you move towards abstraction with the objective of never arriving at abstraction, you end up doing surrealist works. I knew it once I had seen the first paintings that I was making in that vein. Now, when I look at this work, I see even Dalí in it. I see the melting clocks, but that was never the first initial idea. I just wanted to move away because I wanted to reflect on the digital age and the world we live in.
We grew up as millennials or Gen Z, where there is this whole other space that is non-physical but very real. I hate it when Boomers tell you, “It’s not reality,” because it’s not physical. If somebody digitally sends you a love poem, that’s very real. If somebody likes something and you like the person, the digital communication is very real. The paintings exist in these void-like situations because I didn’t want to have a background that would situate them somewhere in the real world. That’s not where they’re from. They’re ideas, and they’re representative objects of something that exists as a feeling—but they’re not real things.
GA: You’ve called Moth (2025) the centrepiece of the show. What are you referencing in this work?
CS: It’s a reference to the first actual bug that was detected in a Harvard Mark II computer by Grace Hopper, a computer engineer, around fifty years ago. She found this little moth that had gone into the relay and taped it down in her log and wrote: “This is the first actual case of a bug being found in a computer.” I really like this idea of something alive going into the inner workings of a machine and kind of fucking with it, or corrupting it. Something natural is going into a system that is supposed to be alien and mechanical and technological, and playing with it.
The moth is also a strong symbol in German poetry. There’s this idea of the moth going to the light and then being burned alive. And here you have kind of the reverse, where the moth is like the rogue perpetrator of an attack. It’s leading a cyberattack. The moth that I painted is also very dreamy—it’s not an actual moth that exists, but it almost looks like a bunny. It speaks to doom-scrolling culture and cute little online videos. My work similarly tries to lure you in but then you always find out it’s not quite right. You think, “Oh, this is cute and familiar,” and then realise, “But it doesn’t really exist.”
GA: What about Small Lovers (2025)?
CS: This is from a series called Virtually Yours that speaks to the idea of relationships, with some works referencing melancholia, which is a sentiment that is very German and very Baroque, somehow. It’s kind of cosy and sweet, and they look like cute little beings that are kissing. But at the same time, it could also be like they’re leeches sucking off of each other. I feel like these speak in a very direct way about how relationships feel to me. But the actual driving force behind these is that they’re works of anti-portrait. When you look at them, they look like portraits. They do everything that a portrait does in terms of inhabiting the space of the painting. But the one thing that a portrait is supposed to do—that is, conveying likeness—they don’t do. The moment we want to find the face, there is no face. It’s also corrupting the idea of what a portrait is supposed to do. So you have all the elements, but then you don’t have the likeness—the looking back at you in the work.
GA: And Parthenogenesis V (2025)?
CS: This work is from a series called Parthenogenesis, which is a Greek word for self-reproduction, or reproduction without a male, so to speak. This series deals with the idea of the Virgin Mary in art history, but at the same time, you wouldn’t see it just by looking at it. It speaks to self-sufficiency. When people comment on my work, they often talk about fashion or clothing. In fact, Givenchy did a campaign with [Jenna Ortega] that looks so similar to this painting. I feel like these works end up on mood boards and are being used, which I think is a good thing because it means the work is as contemporary as I want it to be. It’s important to me that it’s not nostalgic. I think the best storage medium we have for images is painting—much easier than VHS cassettes or CD-ROMS or websites. You don’t need to plug it in to see it. Maybe it loses a little bit of its luminescence if you roll it and you leave it for fifty years, but you can still see a thing when you unwrap it. It’s very durable and it’s radically contemporary. It doesn’t need electricity when the apocalypse comes.
GA: Your work Untitled (Portrait of Meret and Christina) (2025) draws on both Meret Oppenheim and Christina Ramberg. What do these figures mean to you?
CS: It’s titled after Meret Oppenheim, who you may know from the fur cup, and the other one is Christina Ramberg, a Chicago-based painter who did amazing, feminine works. When I was composing this image, I was really thinking about how a blend of those two practices would look. It’s about how women present in society. You have the hair put up in a kind of professional way, and the high heel shoe which is also a marker for social conformity but also sensuality. Again, the work speaks about portraiture. I’m always coming back to portraiture because I’m so interested in humans, I think. I always felt like an alien. For me, it’s really looking at humans and figuring out how they move in a space, how they move socially. I think that’s also why social sciences were so interesting for me, because I find living creatures so weird and fascinating.
GA: You also have a foundation in sociology. How have sociological studies informed your work as an artist, particularly in your interest in how bodies and identities are shaped by technology?
CS: I didn’t know how useful it would be, and I hid that I have that background for a while, but in the writing, it started coming out. I think my background in sociology is so important because it’s why I distrust the human body as a natural body—because in sociology, the body always exists in relation to the social surroundings, the prerequisites that exist in society. And I think this is also what is in the work. Not all of the bodies are real bodies. When people look at the work, they talk about how visceral it is. They talk about the surface. They talk about interactions. They talk sometimes about figures, people. And at the end of the day, they’re all very abstract concepts. So, I’m more working with concepts or objects, I would say.
GA: Your work often asks whether technology brings us closer together or pushes us further apart. Where do you stand on that tension?
CS: I think I’m really moving between these spaces because I use a lot of Photoshop, but there are also works that are just my assistant posing in certain draperies. I work a lot with the phone and have apps that I play around with. I even used Snapchat in very early work. I also have an image archive that I can then use again, and now I’m also playing with AI a little bit. But you would be surprised how limited it still is in certain areas. Sometimes it’s interesting, but it just changes everything in a way that you have much more control over when you go back to other image-generating programs, like Photoshop. Or sometimes I even photograph drawings that I make and then feed them back into the system. I’m quite gung-ho about it, I would say. For me, there is no hierarchy. I’m also not a big fan of high culture and low culture, because I feel if a lot of people like something, there is a certain relevance. That’s the sociologist in me.
