Artwork by Harmony Korine
The first U.S. museum survey for multidisciplinary, Miami-based artist and renowned filmmaker Harmony Korine opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) during April.
Bringing together over 50 works — some on view for the first time — “Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense” offers a comprehensive look at Korine’s transgressive and boundary-breaking practice, tracing the full arc of his career from his earliest works featuring “childlike” figures and drawings to key collaborations with Christopher Wool and Rita Ackermann, to his most recent “Aggro Dr1ft” series consisting of film, paintings, and virtual environments.
Marking the first institutional presentation to fully contextualize Korine’s work across media, the exhibition is curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman artistic director, and Gean Moreno, director of the Art + Research Center, and is on view at ICA Miami from Apr. 15 through Oct. 4.
Since entering the public consciousness at the age of 19 after writing the screenplay for generation-defining feature film Kids (1995), Korine’s filmmaking has continuously pushed the boundaries of the form, while simultaneously crossing disciplines into painting, photography, collage, zines, and drawing.
In his most recent works, Korine utilizes figurative and abstract painting as a foundation for experimenting with various image-making technologies, from photocopies to gaming engines, translating his filmic preoccupations to new mediums. Korine has long explored themes of the individual and the outsider, celebrity, and authenticity and is fascinated by the psyche and figure of the American teenager.
Korine’s work is also deeply informed by his close relationship to Miami. Having lived in the city for more than a decade, the artist often cites the cultural fabric of the evolving cultural and social landscape as a source of inspiration and dialogue in his practice. The presentation offers a new contextualization of his practice and its relationship with both the rich contemporary culture of Miami and the gothic dimensions of the American South.
“Perfect Nonsense” examines the evolution of Harmony Korine’s multidisciplinary practice and his ongoing pursuit of new visual languages over the course of almost three decades.
The exhibition unfolds in a series of chapters, opening with Korine’s early works from 1997 onward, including collages, handwritten notations, paintings, and photographs.
These pieces feature childlike figures, fragmented texts, and imagery that explore themes of adolescence, vulnerability, boredom, and alienation. Rooted in coming-of-age narratives, these works establish Korine’s early interest in outsider perspectives and intuitive, non-linear forms of storytelling.
These motifs evolve in later chapters, including sections dedicated to Korine’s film Trash Humpers and photographic works related to it, as well as the Shadow Fux paintings, which delve into Korine’s fascination with absurdity, aggression, and subcultural aesthetics.
In a subsequent chapter which includes photographs of Macaulay Culkin during his time in seclusion and appropriated Norwegian black metal images, Korine explores figures that have been relegated to the social margins. In time, the figures that appear in the work begin to take on more spectral and unstable forms. This transformation culminates in the emergence of a recurring ghostly character known as “Twitchy,” seen in paintings that merge low-resolution imagery captured via iPhone technology with painterly techniques.
The exhibition then turns to Korine’s abstract paintings followed by the “Florida Room” chapter, which reflects Korine’s residency in Miami since 2015, a period that has profoundly shaped both the imagery and attitude of his recent work.
“Perfect Nonsense” concludes with “Aggro Dr1ft,” Korine’s most recent body of work, which pushes his exploration of digital aesthetics, gaming culture, and hyper-stylized violence to new extremes. Blurring the boundaries between film, painting, and virtual environments, “Aggrodr1ft” represents the latest iteration of Korine’s relentless experimentation and refusal to settle into a fixed form.
“Harmony Korine is one of the most singular and uncompromising voices in contemporary culture,” said Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman artistic director. “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, bringing his work to the public in a way that showcases his broad range of experimentation and influences.”
“As one of the preeminent visual artists in Miami, Harmony Korine’s work resists coherence and embraces intuition and fragmentation as strategies for seeing the world differently,” noted Gean Moreno, director of the Art + Research Center. “The exhibition captures his quest for new visual languages and frames his work as an ongoing experiment in perception.”
ICA Miami’s spring season also features solo exhibitions of Manuel Chavajay and Manoucher Yektai and a major presentation of contemporary works drawn from the museum’s growing permanent collection.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami is located at 61 NE 41 St., Miami, Florida, 33137. For more information, visit www.icamiami.org.
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