Whitehot Recommends: Almost Human at LOHAUS SOMINSKY

Charlie Stein, Moth (2025)

Charlie Stein: Almost Human 
December 12, 2025 - January 10, 2026 
Opening: Thursday, December 11 (6-8pm)
62 White Street, 10013 New York  

By WM, December 2025

From the press release: 

LOHAUS SOMINSKY is proud to announce Almost Human, the first New York solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Charlie Stein, in their new Gallery space in Tribeca.

Charlie Stein‘s work negotiates the fragile border between embodied presence and technological illusion. Her practice reflects an ongoing fascination with figures that are neither fully human nor fully artificial—entities suspended in psychological and material ambiguity.

The exhibition features new paintings that examine humanity’s long-standing desire to animate the inanimate, from mythic metal bodies to today’s algorithmic doubles. Stein approaches this lineage with a distinctly contemporary urgency. Her figures, rendered with a tactile softness that collides with digital luminosity, appear as beings in transition—charged not by narrative, but by the relational electricity between artwork and viewer.

Central to the exhibition is the artist’s conviction that painting is still one of the most radically contemporary storage technologies we possess. In her recent interview with Numéro Magazine Stein explains: “We know how to preserve oil on canvas for centuries. Every major museum employs teams of conservators who specialize in stabilizing pigments, repairing canvases, and slowing down the aging of oil paint. Compare that with the fragility of digital images: formats become obsolete, hardware breaks, and even when stored carefully, files can vanish because the infrastructure that supports them collapses.”

For her, painting is not nostalgic at all, but radically contemporary and this belief anchors the show’s exploration of what it means to perceive, to touch, and to be touched in an era when the boundaries of the human are increasingly porous.

One of the key pieces in Almost Human is Moth (Grace), a painting that reaches back to one of the most fragile myths of technological history: the moment in 1945 when computer pioneer Grace Hopper found an actual moth caught in the relays of the Harvard Mark II—recorded in her logbook as “the first actual case of bug being found.” The artist transforms this anecdote into an image of uncanny tenderness: the moth becomes a hybrid emblem of accident and agency, a creature that once interrupted a machine and, in doing so, entered the mythology of computation. In Charlie Stein’s reading, it becomes a reminder that even the most sophisticated systems are undone by the smallest bodies—an allegory of how intimacy, error, and embodiment remain entangled at every threshold of the technological. Marking her New York debut, Almost Human offers a quietly radical meditation on embodiment, imagination, and the strange aliveness of images in the age of simulation. WM