Harmony Korine is an original. If you’re reading the OC blog, you know this. You’ve been watching Korine’s movies ever since you had to hide in your room to "study" and watch the weirdo-core masterpiece Gummo (1997) with your best friend who heard it was so sick, and you had to slip it past the rental clerk at your local video spot since you weren't exactly of age. And his film Spring Breakers was 2012 to a T.
What’s less known is that when the 42-year-old American director is not making movies, he’s furiously producing paintings in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. And if you love Korine’s work, a lot of the same unhinged, crass qualities echo in his art—but they just take a little more time to find. In fact, the paintings are more like visual treasure hunts than paintings at all.
Harmony Korine: Raiders opened at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills this past weekend, a collection of paintings that are redolent of immediacy and experimentation. At first, when you walk into the gallery, you see several large-scale checkerboard paintings. These are the same checks found on Vans skate shoes, a gallery representative tells us. But upon closer inspection, the paintings are less paintings than assemblages. Hidden under syrupy globs of paint is the top of a paint can, and there’s a texture to the canvas provided by crumbled pieces of paper.
Korine wanders into the gallery as we're looking at the paintings. “I created most of these in basements and warehouses,” he says, clearly relishing the ability to return to the nasty, gritty, hands-on making that he earned his reputation for as an independent filmmaker in the ’90s.
Elsewhere in the gallery are a series of striped paintings. These are enticing in their use of color palettes: some in chilled-out blues and greens, others explosive in Technicolor. Sneaky bits of silver spray paint belie his skater roots again, peeking out just enough to feel like an Easter egg when spotted.
Upstairs at the gallery hangs “Raider Burst,” which looks like a tie-dye T-shirt exploding from the wall. And then, there are several of Korine’s figurative paintings—maniacal, clown-like sunbursts surrounded by even more maniacal sycophants; an abstract dog standing in front of what might be a dark wizard; smiley faces that take incredible artistic liberty. There’s a sense that Korine is dabbling in non-narrative work that is more interpretable than his films—that, instead of spelling everything out in high-definition, he'll allow the viewer to dictate what's in front of them.
The thing that rings most Korinesque is the freedom of the paintings. Like the artist’s frenetic, surreal films, there is a sense of gestural action in the works. “Franz Kline’s nightmare” and “Sol LeWitt after a head injury” are two thoughts that come to mind at various points. It’s easy to see that Korine uses nontraditional painting techniques, favoring sticks, sponges, and fingers instead of brushes. His canvases aren’t primed (in fact, they’re actually packing blankets). Paint is globbed and pooled instead of intricately brushed.
And it’s all with a sense of playfulness we’ve come to expect from Korine, almost more than his most recent films. “This,” he says, ami
What’s less known is that when the 42-year-old American director is not making movies, he’s furiously producing paintings in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. And if you love Korine’s work, a lot of the same unhinged, crass qualities echo in his art—but they just take a little more time to find. In fact, the paintings are more like visual treasure hunts than paintings at all.
Harmony Korine: Raiders opened at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills this past weekend, a collection of paintings that are redolent of immediacy and experimentation. At first, when you walk into the gallery, you see several large-scale checkerboard paintings. These are the same checks found on Vans skate shoes, a gallery representative tells us. But upon closer inspection, the paintings are less paintings than assemblages. Hidden under syrupy globs of paint is the top of a paint can, and there’s a texture to the canvas provided by crumbled pieces of paper.
Korine wanders into the gallery as we're looking at the paintings. “I created most of these in basements and warehouses,” he says, clearly relishing the ability to return to the nasty, gritty, hands-on making that he earned his reputation for as an independent filmmaker in the ’90s.
Elsewhere in the gallery are a series of striped paintings. These are enticing in their use of color palettes: some in chilled-out blues and greens, others explosive in Technicolor. Sneaky bits of silver spray paint belie his skater roots again, peeking out just enough to feel like an Easter egg when spotted.
Upstairs at the gallery hangs “Raider Burst,” which looks like a tie-dye T-shirt exploding from the wall. And then, there are several of Korine’s figurative paintings—maniacal, clown-like sunbursts surrounded by even more maniacal sycophants; an abstract dog standing in front of what might be a dark wizard; smiley faces that take incredible artistic liberty. There’s a sense that Korine is dabbling in non-narrative work that is more interpretable than his films—that, instead of spelling everything out in high-definition, he'll allow the viewer to dictate what's in front of them.
The thing that rings most Korinesque is the freedom of the paintings. Like the artist’s frenetic, surreal films, there is a sense of gestural action in the works. “Franz Kline’s nightmare” and “Sol LeWitt after a head injury” are two thoughts that come to mind at various points. It’s easy to see that Korine uses nontraditional painting techniques, favoring sticks, sponges, and fingers instead of brushes. His canvases aren’t primed (in fact, they’re actually packing blankets). Paint is globbed and pooled instead of intricately brushed.
And it’s all with a sense of playfulness we’ve come to expect from Korine, almost more than his most recent films. “This,” he says, ami