At Design Miami, the showstopper was a sculptural, hand-carved armoire-bar by Christopher Kurtz, at the booth of London’s Sarah Myerscough Gallery. Standing in front of the cabinet’s billowing angel’s wing-like poplar doors, Kurtz told me that the piece served, for him, as a deep philosophical excursion into not just the many implications of Covid-19, but pandemics past more generally. “I started looking at a lot of the Medieval, perpendicular-style architecture, and how that became stripped down and devoid of ornament, because the first people to die were the craftspeople,” he said, referencing the Black Death. “Gothic became more austere, vertical, parallel lines. That austerity was a way out of the bleakness of the situation.”
As Art Basel Turns 20, Miami Art Week Enters a New, Slightly Less Hyped-Up Dawn
Spencer Bailey, The Slowdown, December 2, 2022
