Artists

Lucy Stein

Press release

Galerie Gregor Staiger is pleased to announce Esoteric Erotica, a new exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Lucy Stein, opening on 26 February in Zurich.

“My worldview is gynocratic and wild: I have no interest in pornography, other than to recognise it as illustrative of our cold techno-capitalist moment, that I reject with every atom of my being, as a person and as an artist. But I have used pornographic images occasionally here, to make the point that paint as a fluid medium is itself erotic.”

In Esoteric Erotica, Stein brings together the erotic and the esoteric as parallel modes of radical sensitivity. Both describe an atmosphere that deepens rather than clarifies, descending into a minor key: psychosexual, mournful, and peripheral. Far removed from pornography the erotic here is a site of immersion, vulnerability, and knowledge. Influenced by Audre Lorde and Andrea Dworkin’s writings, Stein’s new body of work explores eroticism as psychological group experience rather than spectacle. Humour emerges as their most devilish ingredient, disrupting any reductive reading of excess or transgression. Stein’s cosmology unfolds across the paper and canvases: snails, lunulas (half moon shaped votive offerings), Bucca (the Cornish horned god), Atlantic folklore, wild horses and wax recur as symbols. Many of the works were made at the artist’s home in London using votive candles as material, reinforcing the exhibition’s grounding in ritual, intimacy, and domestic devotion.

Lucy Stein was born in Oxford, UK (1979) and lives between St Just, Cornwall and London, UK. She studied at Glasgow School of art, Glasgow and De Ateliers, Amsterdam. “Lunula”, a solo exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, is opening on 12 March 2026.