Badlands: Christopher Kurtz

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 walk 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. The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication, ‘Some Assembly Required’, featuring an in-depth critical essay by world-renowned writer and curator Glenn Adamson. The essay investigates the ideas and forces that animate BADLANDS, situating Kurtz’s practice within the broader currents of contemporary craft. Alongside this, an essay by Sara Imari Walker opens a compelling dialogue between art and science, bringing a fresh disciplinary lens to Kurtz’s cyclical processes of accumulation, erosion, and transformation and their similarities to Assembly Theory, as explored in her book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence, published in 2024.