Charlie Engman

Charlie ENGMAN’s  AI-GENERATED works are at once uncanny, familiar  and endearing.

 

Collection

Charlie Engman has a gift for conveying the intangible in his use of AI tools to generate photographic works that are at once uncanny, familiar and endearing.  

From depictions of his subjects embracing soft bulbous sculptures of themselves to images in which men appear to be forming emotional bonds with sea creatures, Charlie’s playful use of AI generators, creates dreamlike settings that explore human vulnerabilities.

Artist Statement 

Some questions that are always at the forefront of my art practice: how do my images relate to the images that precede and surround them; what expectations are we bringing to images, and how are these expectations established and reinforced; what purpose do these expectations serve and how can we interact with these expectations?

AI image generators are a fascinating new tool for exploring these questions because they create images based upon a dataset of hundreds of millions of preexisting imagery but are otherwise unfettered by the preexisting expectations of visual culture. That is, they make new images based on predictions from all the images (and image tags) that precede them. However, they are not otherwise bound by human logic or cultural codes and therefore make images that reflect these codes in surprising and often challenging ways, like a funhouse mirror. There is a beautiful collapse of category distinctions and a dynamic interplay between un-indoctrinated naivety and an appreciation of precedent. 

 BIO

Charlie Engman, originally from Chicago, started taking pictures while studying Japanese and Korean studies at the University of Oxford. Intertwining with his art practice, he now stages, styles and photographs people and objects for notable fashion magazines and brands.
Charlie Engman’s work has appeared in AnOther Magazine, Dazed, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Vogue, The New Yorker et al. and in campaigns for Prada, Marni, Hermès, Sonia Rykiel, Stella McCartney or Vivienne Westwood. MOM was exhibited in solo shows at the Scrap Metal Gallery in Toronto in 2018 and in the Lishui Biennial in China in 2019. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Since 2022 Engman has expanded his practice to include AI tools. 

Artist Details

AI Generated Image of Portraits

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