Artifact-Centric Systems are a novel paradigm in service-oriented computing. In the present contribution we show that model checking bounded, nonuniform artifact-centric systems is undecidable. We provide a partial model checking procedure for artifact-centric systems against the universal fragment of a first-order version of the logic CTL. We obtain this result by introducing a counterpart semantics and developing an abstraction methodology operating on these structures. This enables us to generate finite abstractions of infinite artifactcentric systems, hence perform verification on abstract models.