about — Kurt

KURT LYONS

Kurt Lyons is a London & New York based artist working across painting and photography. He is interested in duration, in what accumulates on a surface when no one is watching, and in the strange fidelity of things that have been worn down. From these overlooked traces he builds immersive landscapes that hover between a place remembered and a place coming apart. His work asks whether clarity was ever the point, and offers instead the deeper truth of things half seen, weathered, and still here.

His source imagery holds the pressures of the present, environmental strain, political noise, the churn of mediated information we can no longer see past. These conditions are never depicted directly. They are absorbed into the surface and worked over until they survive only as atmosphere, a pressure you feel rather than read. The landscapes carry the weather of the world that made them, without ever naming it.

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Kurt Lyons' relationship with the image began early. He started out as a child actor in Los Angeles, then spent three decades as a designer, founding the experiential design company Takeform and leading its creative direction for over twenty years, shaping how images meet architecture at scale. He came to fine art not as a departure from that work but as its continuation, the same lifelong attention to surface and image.

Education

2026 MA Fine Art Painting, Royal College of Art, London
2025 MA Fine Art Photography, Royal College of Art, London
1996 BFA Graphic Design (Honors), ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Exhibitions

2026 Spectral Disruption, RCA Graduate Show, London

2025 Liminal Matters, Woodseer Street Gallery, London (group) Residue: Compositions of Overlooked Matter and Accumulated Time

2025 Residue: Compositions of Overlooked Matter and Accumulated Time, RCA Graduate Show, London

2020 GOOD DESIGN Show Europe, The European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies, Athens (in conjunction with The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design)

Selected Awards, Design and Creative Direction

2012–2023 GOOD DESIGN Award, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design (10x)

2015–2019 ADEX Award for Design Excellence, Design Journal (11x)

2013–2019 Best of NeoCon, IIDA / IFMA / Contract (4x)

2015, 2019 Nightingale Gold Award, The Center for Health Design (2x)

Professional

2002–2024 Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Takeform, Rochester, NY
1996–2002 Vice President of Design, JB3D, Orange County, CA

Patents

Vivid, US Patent No. 8,869,440 and 9,224,316
Nest, US Patent No. D699,300
View, US Patent No. D688,745 and D734,394