Charles Graef

I create digital works that hover between portraiture and abstraction, often beginning with straightforward photographic imagery and then disassembling it through generative algorithms, collage processes, and layered digital manipulation. I’m drawn to the point where structure starts to fray — where a figure dissolves into pattern, or where chaos resolves briefly into clarity before slipping away again.

My work blends painterly gesture, diagrammatic fragments, and algorithmic “misfires” that I gather and recompose into dense, intricate surfaces. Each piece is built from many versions of itself, as if all its possible identities were colliding at once.

Water Bar, Blum Helman Gallery, NYC, 1992
Ecstasy, Dooley Le Capellaine Gallery, NYC, 1993
Sea No Sea, 578 Gallery, NYC, 1993
Woodstock 1994 Art Wall, Saugerties, NY, 1994
Oudoor Museum Of Art, Brooklyn, NY, 1994
Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY, 1994
BWAC, Brooklyn, NY, 1994
Common Sense, Rita House, Los Angeles, 2025