Over the last thirty years, Harmony Korine has cultivated a multidisciplinary art practice that resists categorization and is admired internationally for the improvisation, humor, repetition, nostalgia and poetry that unite the disparate aspects of his output. Working in recent years primarily with painting and photography, his practice is built upon tireless experimentation and a trial-and-error path that produces what he calls “Mistakist Art”. Inspired by material culture, Korine often incorporates everyday items - squeegees, house paint, steak knives, old VHS tapes - into his compositions, which are frequently embellished with distorted language and intentionally misspelled words. Korine’s oeuvre is both deliberate and erratic, figurative and abstract, and, like his films, blurs boundaries between “high” and “low” in ways that simultaneously attract and repel viewers with its hypnotic, otherworldly atmosphere.

Marc Payot, President, Hauser & Wirth, says, “we are delighted to welcome Harmony Korine to the gallery. In his multidisciplinary practice over the past three decades, Harmony has performed a sort of real-time psychoanalysis of contemporary America––and done so on his own terms, fearlessly, without pandering or seeking consensus. Our fixations on youth, material consumption and disposability, violence and romantic anti-heroes, all find their way into his work, from films and writing to drawings and paintings. In this sense, Harmony takes his place among such artists in our program as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Rita Ackermann. We look forward to collaborating with Harmony in the months and years ahead”.

Among his generation’s most influential filmmakers, Korine rose to prominence after writing the script for the film “Kids” (1995), directed by Larry Clark. Everything he has made since has been guided by memory, emotion, and physical sensation as opposed to strategy and rational thought. Of his art, he has said, “I’m chasing something that is more of a feeling, something more inexplicable, a connection to colors and dirt and character, something looping and trancelike, more like a drug experience or a hallucination”.