about — Kurt

KURT LYONS

I approach painting through the transformation of digitally captured residue and trace. Scratches, stains, material waste, and incidental marks are gathered not to preserve what they once indexed but to displace them, layering, burying, and re-marking until the surface operates as an invented terrain rather than a record. The accumulated gestures behave less like image and more like sediment, where time registers as strata. At the core of this practice is a desire to elevate what is reflexively overlooked, drawing out the visual and material force of what culture discards, ignores, or misreads as noise.

This work occupies a liminal zone between mediums and states: between capture and making, between document and invention, between the logic of the built world and the unruly behavior of matter under pressure. My background in design and architecture introduces a sensitivity to spatial tension and structure, but the work is ultimately shaped by resistance, by abrasion, friction, and the persistence of what refuses to vanish.

Instead of depicting landscape, the work constructs one—a landscape not of place but of residual events. These pieces propose that landscape can exist as aftermath, a site where erasure, repetition, and correction become compositional forces. At this threshold, the photographic source is neither denied nor declared; it is metabolized. What remains is a painterly field of interference and time, a terrain built from what lingers after intention.

Born in Los Angeles, California. Lives and works in London, UK.

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Education:
Royal College of Art, MA
ArtCenter College of Design, BFA
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Awards & Recognitions:
Kurt has been recognized with dozens of prestigious awards for creative excellence including:

- 8x International GOOD DESIGN award recipient.
As awarded by: The Chicago Athenaeum
Museum of Architecture and Design.

- 9x ADEX Award recipient for design excellence

- 2x Nightingale Award recipient
As awarded by The Center for Health Design

- 5x Best of NeoCon Award recipient for design excellence
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Featured works at GOOD DESIGN Show Europe 2020
The European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies. Athens, Greece.
In conjunction with: The Chicago Anthenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design.