Words by Phillip Edward Spradley, Portrait by Dale Grant

Interview with Charlie Stein, on painting as a radically contemporary medium at Kunsthalle II, Mallorca

Berlin-based artist Charlie Stein explores the shifting boundaries where intimacy meets mediation and human presence becomes entangled with artifice. Her paintings depict padded, latexed, or otherwise encased figures that serve as metaphors for how desire, vulnerability, and memory are filtered in a digitized world. What first appears familiar, such as an embrace or a protective gesture, is destabilized through subtle distortion: forms become ambiguous, readability is interrupted, and the line between figure and object collapses. The works stage encounters that feel at once tender and estranged, protective and unsettling—reflecting how contemporary intimacy is continuously negotiated through layers of insulation, screen, and code.

credits: Dale Grant

Phillip Edward Spradley is an American writer, organizer, and producer, and the latest addition to Numero’s circle of contributors. He grew up wanting to be a dark wizard, but ditched the dream when he realized magic was officially dead.

Technically a bit internet-illiterate, Phillip is nonetheless obsessed with the collision of art, technology, and the messy brilliance of interdisciplinary collaboration. He’s organized a dozen exhibitions, produced thousands of cultural events, and has a soft spot for hardcore music and omakase dinners.

 

Phillip has worked his own programming magic for institutions such as Hauser & Wirth, the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and the National Arts Club, just to name a few.

 

For Numero, he caught up with artist Charlie Stein on the occasion of her recent exhibitions in Mallorca: The Real Thing at Centro Cultural Misericordia, Palma, and Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost at Kunsthalle CCA Andratx.

Credits
All images courtesy of Charlie Stein

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