Harmony Korine “Blockbuster”

Gagosian Gallery Madison Avenue

[Image: Harmony Korine’s studio, Nashville, Tennessee (2018) Artwork © Harmony Korine]

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I enjoy the act of disruption—I don’t care about the flow and I don’t want to go with it.
—Harmony Korine

Gagosian presents BLOCKBUSTER, new paintings by Harmony Korine.

Korine’s paintings at once attract and confront viewers with their distinctive aesthetics of perversity, opposition, and grit. Often working with materials found at his local Salvation Army store in Nashville, Tennessee, Korine combines subconscious impulses with objects from everyday life, resulting in what he refers to as “mistakism.” An interest in hypnotic repetition led him to produce his Checking Madness series of warped checkerboard-pattern paintings, while the sequential images in film inspired his Loop Paintings of distorted photographs collaged on canvas, and, in 2016, the swirling “fazor” paintings.

BLOCKBUSTER includes a new series of works that use grids of VHS tapes and their boxes as surfaces for painting. These obsolete items, once the primary medium for distributing the moving image, are painted over with expressive gestures and figures from pop culture. Using squeegees, household paint, steak knives, and masking tape in place of traditional painting tools such as brushes and canvas, Korine creates loosely sequential images that echo the leitmotifs of his films. The geometric rows of painted images, recalling a patchwork quilt, yield variations that vacillate between considered and spontaneous mark making. Both deliberate and erratic, Korine’s paintings invite being studied in minute detail, while washing over the viewer not unlike sequences in a film.

Korine’s cult movies of the past twenty years—from the surreal Gummo (1997) to the noirish Spring Breakers (2012)—merge reality with fiction, handheld camerawork with precise montage. This same heady mix of the unplanned, the seductive, and the outlandish crystallizes in his highly tactile paintings.