Tender Stems

PaintingWriting is a Manchester-based group of early-career painters focused on elevating the status of writing within painting. ‘Tender Stems’ is a group Show inspired by Gertrude Stein’s chapter ‘Food’ in the Modernist prose collection ‘Tender Buttons’ (1914).

 

With a focus on painting and expanded painting in the realms of sculpture, photography, installation, performance and film - and in the spirit of Fluxus ‘salad-makers’ - artists were asked to respond to a set of surreal food instructions taken from the ‘Tender Buttons’ text, such as;

 

‘BUTTER

Boom in, boom in, butter. Leave a grain and show it, show it.

I spy.

It is a need it is a need that a flower a state flower. It is a need that a state rubber. It is a need that a state rubber is sweet and sight and a swelled stretch. It is a need. It is a need that state rubber.

Wood a supply.

Clean little keep a strange, estrange on it.

Make a little white, no not with pit, pit on in within.’

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