Harmony Korine

There’s a physical component that I’m chasing—a sense of unease, or a sense of confusion, transcendence, bewilderment, titillation, humor.
—Harmony Korine

Rooted in modern American grotesquerie, the work of Miami-based artist and filmmaker Harmony Korine has proven influential and divisive in equal measure. A lover of slapstick and vaudeville, he coined the term “mistakism” to describe his deployment of wayward aesthetics and non sequitur wit. Korine’s early appearances as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman, introducing startled television viewers to a confrontational master of everyday beauty and repulsion, are the stuff of legend. In his paintings, drawings, assemblages, and movies, backwoods surrealism and narcotic abstraction collide to produce a perverse, disorienting vision.

Born in Bolinas, California, in 1973, Korine was raised on a commune before moving with his family to North Africa and settling, at age seven, in Nashville, Tennessee. Having started making art as a teenager—he once painted, at the car wash where he worked, a neon dragon inside Roy Orbison’s trunk—Korine attended film school at New York University. An encounter with photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark let him to write the screenplay for Clark’s controversial movie Kids (1995). He went on to direct Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) before spending much of the next eight years “mowing lawns and shooting guns,” emerging only to write Clark’s 2002 feature Ken Park. Korine returned to directing in 2007 with Mister Lonely (codirected with his brother Avi Korine), also writing and directing Trash Humpers (2009), Spring Breakers (2012), and The Beach Bum (2019).

In 2004, Korine’s artwork was included in Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture, which traveled through 2009 from the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, to venues throughout the US and Europe. The exhibition featured Korine’s work alongside that of other artists, including Mark Gonzales, Barry McGee, and Chris Johanson, to whom the youth subcultures of skateboarding and graffiti were of critical significance. Also in 2009, Korine was the subject of an important solo exhibition, Pigxote, at Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville. The following years saw him exhibit periodically, with a major survey exhibition of his work taking place at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2017.