Livia Stein, a UC Berkeley Alum, has had her work held in numerous permanent collections, including the Oakland Museum of California, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art and now she is exhibiting her work in 220 Stephens Hall.

Throughout her work, Livia Stein aims to come to terms with what she calls “the mystery of every human being” — the unarticulated or deeply buried psychic life. “Everyone has their secrets, their thoughts and dreams and disappointments. We see only the surface, even with people we’re close to.”

Monsters and Others addresses our attempts to penetrate that surface. The paintings depict tentative and often failed efforts at communication between human beings and other sorts of beings (whether animal or monster, real or imagined). The works highlight the gap between “what we try to understand and what we actually grasp” in our encounters.

Monsters and Others