Charlie Stein The Real Thing at La Misericordia Palma

Centro Cultural La Misericordia Palma

Plaza del Hospital,4, Palma

Opening Saturday September 20 / 6pm till 11pm 2025

Talk : Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma

Oct 1st, 2025

The Real Thing

Charlie Stein’s upcoming exhibition at Misericordia takes its title from The Real Thing, the cult Australian pop song released in 1969 by Russell Morris. Half sincerity, half spectacle, the track was both a tongue-in-cheek reply to Coca-Cola’s advertising slogan and a covert anti-war anthem. Its six-minute collage of sitars, phased vocals and surreal samples culminates with a German children’s choir drowned out by the sound of an atomic bomb — a haunting emblem of the Vietnam era and Cold War dread.

Reframing this title more than fifty years later, Stein asks what “real” could mean now. In an age of mediated intimacy, simulated bodies and image saturation, the pursuit of authenticity is inseparable from artifice. The Real Thing explores this double edge through painting: where tenderness collides with spectacle, where commodification shades into madness, and where the search for truth remains irreducibly entangled with its own contradictions.