Badlands: Christopher Kurtz
Upcoming exhibition
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Upper and Lower Gallery
The Schoolhouse
This career-spanning survey of Christopher Kurtz’s sculptural and design practices 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 3,000 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.
“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
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