Badlands: Christopher Kurtz
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UPPER & LOWER GALLERIES
THE SCHOOLHOUSE
LONDON
Free Admission
“Abstraction, functionality, naturalism: all are held in miraculous suspension in the exhibition. The effect is that of a chance encounter in the wilderness, where it’s not quite clear where natural processes end and human intervention has begun.” - Glenn Adamson
Sarah Myerscough Gallery presents BADLANDS, a career-spanning survey of Christopher Kurtz’s sculptural and design practices. The exhibition takes place in our recently restored Mayfair gallery, The Schoolhouse, during the Autumn season of both Frieze and PAD, from September 19th to November 7th 2026.
The title references the prehistoric landscape of the South Dakota Badlands — a place embedded in Kurtz’s origins and central to his philosophy. Named for its difficulty to cross, Kurtz sees its terrain as an ideal that aligns with his studio practice: a lived experience where moving forward is negotiated through resistance, repetition, and persistence.
At the heart of the exhibition is a major installation of 4,000 wooden ‘skipping stones’ spread across the space for visitors to wade through, a vast, immersive ‘stone landscape’. Born from the off-cuts of his design pieces accumulated over 20 years in his studio, the stones vary in wood, size, and texture. Small remnants of process, they have accumulated here into their own monumental work.
"Over the years, the studio has accumulated a large volume of material [...] offcuts too small, too irregular, or too flawed for furniture, but too valuable to discard. The studio itself has started to resemble a kind of quarry or excavation site — a landscape formed through slow material abrasion and accumulation over time.” — Christopher Kurtz
The upper floors of the gallery will be dedicated to Kurtz’s design objects, the result of labour-intensive craftsmanship. Amongst them is his 2024 collaboration with textile artist Dana Barnes, Between Us: Tête-à-Tête, previously on display at the MAD Museum in New York.
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Extract of 'Some Assemble Required'
by Glenn Adamson
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York and London. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the V&A.
Dr. Adamson’s publications include Thinking Through Craft (2007); The Craft Reader (2010); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011, with Jane Pavitt); The Invention of Craft (2013); Art in the Making (2016, with Julia Bryan-Wilson); Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); Objects: USA 2020; and Craft: An American History(2021). His most recent book, A Century of Tomorrows, was published by Bloomsbury in December 2024.
Dr. Adamson is Artistic Director for Design Doha, a biennial in Qatar; curator at large for the Vitra Design Museum; and editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation.
There are certain places in our uncertain world where we Earthlings may not feel quite at home. British readers will know the shingle of Dungeness, for example, with its crunching carpet of flints; and the Burren, in Ireland, where anciently erected dolmens stand proud against a patchwork of limestone, like so many paving stones laid by industrious giants. The USA has many such breathtakingly alien landscapes, among them Death Valley, Yellowstone’s Hot Springs, and the one that concerns us, the Badlands of South Dakota. This is a terrain of eroded sedimentary rock about 400 square miles in extent, where pigmented strata slice horizontally through furrows of hill and chasm. Prehistoric mammals once inhabited the region, as did the Oglala Sioux; it was a site where the famous Ghost Dance was performed, in defiance of colonial dispossession and violence. There are more layers, here, than the eye can see, or the mind could know.
Christopher Kurtz hails from this part of the world, and while he now works in the Hudson Valley – another emblematic American landscape, far to the east – it is still in his bones. His family’s business was in painting road signs and billboards. Often huge in comparison to their own makers, but tiny in relation to the sublime distances they helped motorists to navigate, they might direct the way to Badlands National Park, or to Wall Drug, a much-loved pilgrimage site. They functioned as captions for vistas that are rightly called cinematic (Dances With Wolves was shot partially in the Badlands, among other f ilms), not only for their sheer drama, but also for the way that they engender extreme shifts of scale. Out there, you can gaze out across the distant horizon, feeling as if you’re on horseback even if you’re not, then suddenly have your attention arrested by some close-at-hand thing, a critter or a crevice or a simple smooth stone.
