Kathrin Köster

“Tender Buttons” is part of a sculptural series inspired by Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose — poetic fragments that name ordinary things while liberating them from function or fixed identity. Köster echoes this approach by creating delicate hybrid object  that oscillate between sculpture and score, body and thing, presence and memory.

Tender Buttons is infused with a physicality that is both personal and performative. Porcelain casts of the artist’s hands, translucent layers of paper, and fragile textures become invitations: to imagine, to move, to feel. This work is not just seen — they are activated through proximity, memory, and in some cases, dance. In a collaboration with dancers during the Schrit_tmacher Festival (2019), the object was inhabited and interpreted physically, without fixed choreography, allowing spontaneous bodily responses to the materials.

The title becomes an anchor: tender as in soft, intimate, exposed; buttons as in closures, connections, tactile triggers. The pieces follow no strict logic — instead, they perform a kind of silent dramaturgy, inviting the viewer into a choreography of imagination. 

Tender Buttons is an invitation to dwell in the in-between: where language dissolves, where forms breathe, and where the sensual becomes speculative.

Kathrin Köster is a Berlin-based artist whose practice moves delicately between sculpture, installation, drawing and choreography. Her works often emerge from tactile engagement with fragile materials — porcelain, paper, fabric — and open themselves to a choreography of relations, not only in space, but in how they are perceived, touched, and imagined.

With a background in painting and a strong interest in the somatic, her pieces evoke a soft resistance to fixed meaning. Köster invites viewers to linger in ambiguity, to explore the porous borders between object and body, presence and memory, interiority and form. Her practice becomes a space where sensuality, vulnerability, and transformation coexist. Whether in static display or in movement through dance or installation, her works resist closure, favouring gesture, unfolding, and intimate attention.