What happens when softness and pain blur together? When caring leaves a physical mark? Tender / Tender explores the delicate, raw threshold where being touched means being changed. The title itself operates as a linguistic and emotional hinge: it is at once a noun signifying an active offering of care, affection, and intimacy, and an adjective describing the bruised, vulnerable state left after that contact has occurred. Bringing together new works by Johanna Bath, Emma Currie, Anastasia Kuznetsova, Sondra Meszaros, Jordan Schiffer, and Marie Tomanova, this exhibition investigates the moments when bodies, objects, memories, and relationships become exposed—whether they have been deeply adored, overused, abandoned, or injured. Here, tenderness is not a passive state of gentleness; it is a visceral, transformative site of friction, a virtue, and an undeniable form of strength.
Johanna Bath
The dual nature of the "tender" necessitates an interrogation of how the body — particularly the femme body — is looked at, handled, and recorded. For centuries, the representation of women in visual culture has been flattened by a patriarchal gaze that demands accessibility and strips sensuality of its interior complexity. Johanna Bath's paintings actively push back against this flatness, staging a quiet rebellion rooted in restraint. Her work seeks to create an alternative space where female figures can inhabit vulnerability and where sensuality exists in all its layered, non-linear nuances. Rather than presenting overly exposed or sexualized bodies, Bath generates tension through the unknown: a tightly cropped frame, a covered knee, a mere glimpse of skin. Her subjects possess a melancholic depth that acts like a mirror, staring back at the viewer. By refusing to expose her figures fully, Bath's paintings offer a generous, protective tenderness, elevating softness from a submissive trait to an assertion of power.
Sondra Meszaros
This critique of image-making and the reclamation of femme representation is further decentralized and dissected in the collage work of Sondra Meszaros. Drawing conceptual cues from Dada and feminist performance art, Meszaros's practice is rooted in the physical and psychoanalytic act of collecting, archiving, and re-presenting printed matter. By culling images from vintage fashion, lifestyle, and mid-century erotic publications, she produces compositions rife with unexpected, jarring juxtapositions. A rare erotic fragment from the 1950s sits "impolitely" next to an image from the 1970s, creating an immediate historical and emotional charge. Meszaros uses collage as an action to disrupt and subvert the conventional materiality of the image, asking urgent, elliptical questions: How do we understand femme identities, desire, anxieties, and alienation through these highly mediated, commodified images? Through her sharp fractures and cuts, the paper itself becomes a place of injury and reclamation, refusing to fit neatly into comforting interpretive categories.
Where Meszaros looks at the cultural archive of desire, Emma Currie turns her gaze toward the psychological friction embedded within interpersonal contact. In her paintings tenderness exists alongside a quieter, underlying unease.
Emma Currie
Currie isolates the moment where softness shifts from a gesture of comfort into one of consumption. Her work reminds us that intimacy is rarely uncomplicated; it often brushes dangerously against possession. Each of her images carries the electric charge of an unresolved gesture, suspended indefinitely between opposing forces: attraction and repulsion, safety and danger, holding and withholding. By freezing these gestures at their precipice, Currie highlights the precariousness of giving oneself over to another, mapping the thin line where a caress can easily become a grip.
Marie Tomanova
This blurred line between pleasure and affliction takes on an explicitly physical and environmental dimension in Marie Tomanova's series of Polaroid photos. Tomanova captures the body as it negotiates its own boundaries against the natural world, meditating on the porous nature of the skin. In her imagery and reflections, the environment acts as both an intimate partner and a sharp antagonist. The edges of the Mediterranean Sea press into the body to break the skin, dissolving the barrier between the self, the salt, and the other. Concurrently, the unyielding spines of cacti function as rigid, environmental choreographers, dictating where the body can and cannot go, determining its final shape. For Tomanova, the skin is not a static shield but an active zone of negotiation, a landscape where the body accepts the wounds of its surroundings as proof of its own existence.
Anastasia Kuznetsova
The marks left by intimacy are not always physical; they frequently dwell within the psychic terrain of memory and the subconscious. Anastasia Kuznetsova's monotypes translate this lingering impact through a visual language inspired by dreams and fantasies. Her creative process honors the emotional resonance of the subconscious over literal interpretation, operating on the principle that "it doesn't matter what you see in the dream, it matters how you feel." Kuznetsova's series captures the specific, bittersweet shock of waking from a recurring dream in which the unconscious suddenly resurrects a past intimacy—a person long moved on from, who had not occupied the conscious mind for years. To wake up from such a dream is to find a "fresh cut" all over again, prompting the agonizing question of whether these emotional residues ever truly fade. The tenderness once shared leaves a permanent imprint, shaping the self through a melancholic realization summarized by the artist: "A heart that hurts, is the heart that works."
The permanence of these fragile connections is beautifully articulated through the text-based and digital works of Jordan Schiffer. Schiffer approaches tenderness through the concept of love as an archival force — something that leaves indelible traces long after the immediate moment has evaporated. Incorporating antique ornamentation, delicate flourishes, and the intense intimacy of handwritten correspondence, Schiffer's prints look like fragments of a memory or artifacts of something once deeply held. There is a quiet, monumental beauty in the deliberate marks we leave on one another.
Jordan Schiffer
Ultimately, Tender / Tender positions the act of being vulnerable not as a liability, but as an inevitable, transformative consequence of lived experience. To live, to love, and to encounter another body or image is to risk being bruised. The six artists in this exhibition do not turn away from this pain; instead, they lean into the raw, delicate thresholds of contact. Through painting, collage, printmaking, text, and photography, they demonstrate that tenderness is a continuous cycle of offering and enduring. The works in this gallery serve as a collective testament to the beautiful, terrifying reality that to be touched is, inevitably, to be changed.
Curated and written by Izabela Depczyk