Christopher Kurtz
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Christopher Kurtz
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Christopher Kurtz has gained international attention for his sculpture and studio furniture, which is included in significant private collections. The artist was shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize 2018 with a signature wooden sculptural work. He received the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2005, and in 2007 he received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Award (Lily Auchincloss fellow). He has exhibited as part of Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design at the Museum of Arts and Design, USA. In 2020, he exhibited in “Objects USA 2020” R&Company, New York. His work has been shown at numerous international art and design fairs, including TEFAF Maastricht, Design Miami, PAD and FOG.
Kurtz’s pieces are born, first and foremost, from a sculptural motivation invested in the specificity of objecthood; he comments that, ‘for me, making sculpture is not a conceptual or immaterial practice, it’s physical. I settled on wood as my medium because it’s structural, but also malleable and alive.’ The artist expertly sculpts his material using a carefully chosen palette of tools; often beginning without a predetermined blueprint for the final piece, Christopher works intuitively to create poignant and poetic forms that respond to a personal narrative or reflection and which, in turn, elicit a powerful emotional response from the viewer
Specifically made for the Gallery, inspiration for Christopher’s Skipping Stone series comes from his treasured time skipping stones with his daughter on the Hudson River: ‘It's a way we end each day together. We love searching for the perfect river stone; the shapes are so beautiful to hold - sometimes we can't bear to toss the good ones into the river, and we end up putting them in our pockets, bringing them home and stacking them up’. He uses locally sourced wood such as black American walnut, ash, cherry and white oak and sensitively hand carves each piece into smooth elliptical pebble shapes, expressively balanced to form the structure of the work.
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Upcoming Exhibition
Badlands
Christopher Kurtz 18 September - 7 November 2026
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Works
Christopher Kurtz
Claude Glass Vanity Desk, 2026Claro walnut, silver leaf on glass142.2 H x 111.8 W x 66 D cm
56 H × 44 W × 26 D inFurther images
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Description
The Claude Glass Vanity takes its title from the small, darkened convex mirrors that became fashionable during the eighteenth-century Picturesque movement in Britain. Named after the seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, these pocket-sized mirrors transformed the surrounding landscape into an image that resembled one of his paintings. Carried by artists and travellers, they became especially associated with tourism in Britain's Lake District, where visitors often turned their backs to the landscape and viewed its reflection instead, measuring nature against an inherited ideal of beauty. The Claude glass reminds us that we have long learned to see the world through images made by others. The Picturesque taught viewers to understand landscape through the conventions of European painting, shaping not only what was considered beautiful, but how beauty itself was recognised. Nature was not simply observed—it was interpreted through culture. Like its historical predecessor, the mirror in this work is also an interpretive device. A convex lens of glass is hand silver-leafed, creating a softly mottled reflective surface that subtly alters the image it returns. Rather than offering a perfect likeness, the mirror filters the viewer through its own material character. It reflects not only the body, but the surrounding space, compressing both into a single image. -
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