Filmmaker and artist Harmony Korine has joined Hauser & Wirth, one of the biggest galleries in the world. The move will see Korine leave Gagosian, a mega-gallery that frequently acts a competitor to Hauser & Wirth.
Among the general public, Korine is best known for directing zeitgeist-defining films like 2012’s Spring Breakers, the not-exactly-wholesome tale of four college students who find themselves in more trouble than they asked for when school isn’t in session. Two former Disney Channel stars, Gucci Mane, and James Franco highlight its cast.
Korine is also famous for writing Kids, the 1995 film by Larry Clark about disillusioned teens, and infamous for making 2009’s Trash Humpers, which is about what its title suggests.
Korine is also a painter, too, and has shown his abstractions at art spaces across the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium. He had seven shows with Gagosian between 2014 and 2019. Many of them featured abstractions that enlisted tools such as squeegees and steak knives to obtain a rough-hewn quality mirroring that of some of his films.
“I mostly try just to make moods, just to play them all,” Korine told ARTnews in 2016. “Painting took on a much bigger role in the last couple of years, and actually, it became even more of a focus than the films. The process is different than the movies. At least it’s more singular, and in some ways more gratifying.”
He is the second acclaimed filmmaker to join a mega-gallery in the past few months, after David Lynch, who got representation with Pace in October.
Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, said in a statement, “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.”