English
Deutsch
until 18.11. | #3682ARTatBerlin | BARK BERLIN GALLERY presents from 28th October 2022 the solo exhibition „Flow My Tears“ with new works by the female artist Charlie Stein.
The BARK BERLIN GALLERY shows Charlie Stein – “Flow My Tears”, whoever chooses this title, joins the ranks of artworks by Philip K. Dick and John Dowland, which revolve around the abysses of loss. Abysses that inevitably face everyone – abysses that are felt by those affected to be worse than agonies from hell. Thus Dowland: “…Happy, happy are those who in hell | Do not feel the torments of this world!”
Charlie Stein paints androids in whose facial expressions an enervated aura of charity shines forth, coupled with flashes of a dutiful act of generosity. These humanoids are supposed to be different from us, better in every way, and yet they set out to imitate that which they can never understand. Without motivation, will, or feeling, they mimic that which is completely beyond their programming: the transformative experience of experiencing suffering.
Stein Charlie, Flow My Tears (Eliza Malfunctioning), oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, 2022
The problem with this is that as much as Stein’s robots pretend to have the outward appearance of sadness or grief, they are unable to integrate a sense of melancholic absence into the totality of their programming. In Stein’s robots, the experience of tragedy shimmers. In their polished bodies, we see the best in ourselves, and with it, what we most despise about ourselves: our failures, our hopes, our unmet needs. Even our mortality stares at us through the windows of their eyes, like a crater left by an asteroid in the Earth’s mantle.
But Stein’s enhanced humanoids are not to be envied. With their enhanced features, in their perfected femininity, in the way they project their false sincerity onto the viewer’s vision, they are an alienated image of ourselves. They embody everything we cannot acquire, everything we can never become: to be the unattainable ideal of a unique identity harmoniously at one with ourselves. Despite their flow of tears, they will never understand the infinite vastness of a world that is only felt, and remain forever blind to the shadows that linger in the darkness.
Vernissage: Friday, 28. October 2022, 5 p.m until 9 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: Friday, 28. October 2022 until Friday, 18. July 2022
to the gallery
Exhibition Charlie Stein – BARK BERLIN GALLERY | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
