Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Harmony Korine is set to receive his first major U.S. museum survey. Titled Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense, the comprehensive exhibition will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) on April 15, 2026, offering a deep dive into the transgressive creator’s three-decade career.
Bringing together over 50 works—some on public display for the first time—the exhibition aims to contextualize Korine’s evolution across various media fully. While widely recognized for writing the generation-defining 1995 film Kids at just 19 years old, Korine has continuously pushed the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, seamlessly crossing into painting, photography, collage, drawing, and virtual environments.
Harmony Korine, Cheeto Fountainhead Twitchy, 2020, Oil on canvas
Capehart Photography
Curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, alongside Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center, Perfect Nonsense traces Korine’s enduring fascination with the American teenager, the outsider, and the intersection of celebrity and authenticity. The exhibition is structured as a series of thematic chapters that trace his ongoing pursuit of new visual languages, featuring key collaborations throughout his career with artists such as Christopher Wool and Rita Ackermann.
The exhibition opens with Korine’s early works from 1997 onward, establishing his interest in non-linear storytelling. This section features collages, handwritten notes, and paintings that explore themes of adolescence, vulnerability, and alienation through childlike figures. These motifs evolve into deeper explorations of aggression and subcultural aesthetics, dedicating space to his film Trash Humpers and the Shadow Fux paintings.
Moving into the social margins, the exhibition highlights photographs of Macaulay Culkin during a period of seclusion, displayed alongside appropriated Norwegian black metal imagery. This era also introduces “Twitchy,” a recurring ghostly character born from merging low-resolution iPhone technology with traditional painterly techniques.
Harmony Korine, Burst Manga, 2014, Ink on canvas
Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
Deeply informed by his home base of Miami over the last decade, the subsequent “Florida Room” chapter explores how the city’s evolving cultural fabric and the gothic dimensions of the American South have shaped his recent abstract and figurative works.
The exhibition concludes with Aggro Dr1ft, Korine’s most recent multidisciplinary project. This body of work pushes digital aesthetics, gaming culture, and hyper-stylized violence to new extremes, blurring the lines between film, painting, and virtual spaces.
“Harmony Korine is one of the most singular and uncompromising voices in contemporary culture,” Gartenfeld said in the press release. “His inclination to challenge conventions and blur disciplinary boundaries, alongside his long relationship to Miami, makes ICA Miami a fitting platform for his first solo institutional exhibition.”
Gean Moreno echoed this sentiment, noting Korine’s status as a preeminent visual artist in the city. “Korine’s work resists coherence and embraces intuition and fragmentation as strategies for seeing the world differently,” Moreno stated.
Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense will be on view at ICA Miami from April 15 through October 4, 2026.