Numéro Berlin — Interview with Philip Spradley

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.