Harmony Korine Finds New Forms for His Twisted Visions

After shooting his latest movie, Aggro Dr1ft, in the seaside wilds of Miami, Harmony Korine turned to what he considers another sort of sanctuary—his art studio—to transform scenes from the film into a series of paintings. The movie was shot with infrared cameras, to render the underworld it surveys in the garish and alien hues of a video game, and he wanted the paintings to elicit the same effect. In the studio, he knew how to get in the mood. “I’ll put on some music, things that are on loops. Sometimes I can listen to the same song on a loop for a couple weeks,” he said in September, in a back room at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Los Angeles, where those phantasmagorical new paintings had just gone on view. He pulled out his phone to find a favorite musical cue. “Like, I spent the last month listening to this Nestle’s theme song from the ’80s—the first synthwave song, I think. There’s a loop on YouTube that is an hour.”

Korine hit play and opened a portal to a strange realm in which hazy memories of cultural detritus fought for supremacy with a surreal sense of future shock still reverberating decades later—all to the tune of “Sweet Dreams,” a jingle for Nestle’s Alpine White chocolate bars. A taste of the lyrics, which cast a spell while breathlessly spelling out the brand name over ethereal synthesizer tones:

Sweet dreams you can’t resist, N-E-S-T-L-E-S
A dream as sweet as this, N-E-S-T-L-E-S
Creamy white, dreamy white
Nestle makes the very best, N-E-S-T-L-E-S

The soundscape put him into a kind of time-twisting trance. “It reminds me of being in a shopping mall as a kid buying nunchucks from the ninja shop,” he said, “and that reminds me of the time a throwing star got stuck in my friend’s neck. It really gets me in the zone: listening to this, smoking cigars, sometimes putting on some tap shoes.”

Korine’s studio regimen of late falls in line with the kind of extremely specific and decidedly skewed free-associating he has been famous for since he wrote the screenplay for Kids, the scandalous 1995 movie about lusty teens in nihilistic New York directed by Larry Clark, and subsequently went on to cut a singular figure as a filmmaker and artist in pretty much every other conceivable medium. As he made his name directing his own movies, including Gummo (1997), Mister Lonely (2007), and his surprisingly Hollywood-scale breakouts Spring Breakers (2012) and The Beach Bum (2019), Korine worked simultaneously as a visual artist with a practice based in painting, drawing, photography, and other old and new forms.

The Hauser & Wirth show that brought him to LA was the first with his new gallery since leaving Gagosian after nine years. He was tired from travel related to the premiere of Aggro Dr1ft at the Venice Film Festival, but not tired enough to pass on dinner the night before with his friend Al Pacino (did he have any good Al Pacino stories? “They’re all good,” he said) or to refrain from getting amped up while showing off paintings that look like nothing else he’s painted before.

The new works related to Aggro Dr1ft were transfigured in oil paint that seethes with color. To make them, Korine projected frames he chose from the film onto canvas and worked, in a controlled manner unusual for him as an artist, to refine the radiant aesthetic of the movie. Aggro Dr1ft follows a cast of “rainbow assassins” as they brood and kill their way across heat-streaked Miami vistas, in a style that evokes the sort of moody interstitial scenes that might play out between different levels of a first-person shooter game. The paintings share a similar kind of hyperreal atmosphere.

“I was experimenting with paint trying to make things as vibrant possible, mixing colors to try to replicate the thermal imaging,” Korine said. “I was seeing how far I can push paint. They’re heat-based energy, which is always something I’m interested in. It’s like the vapors of a character, chasing something like vibrations. Besides the fact that I thought it was really beautiful, I like the idea that it blurs the line between abstraction and figures. It’s like a living image, like documenting souls.”

He was in downtown LA for the opening of his show, dressed in a zip-up sweater with the collar flared, periwinkle corduroy pants, and blue suede slip-on shoes completing a look that—especially with his perpetual impish grin—might be described as country-club deviant. We were talking about souls made manifest in the form of heat registered by the infrared cameras he borrowed from NASA, and I asked if he had followed the recent capture of an escaped prisoner in Pennsylvania after searchers in a helicopter identified his warm body hiding in the woods. He had, and put a Korinian spin on a scenario that involved a short Brazilian fugitive slinking through the suburbs for weeks: “I heard the cops were worried that, because he was only five feet tall, he was going to put another short guy on his shoulders and wrap up in a trench coat—and try to pretend to be a taller guy.”

Conversations with Korine tend to careen around and take off on such flights of fancy, as if he’s too creatively restless or dispirited by convention to stay rooted in humdrum reality. His mindset matches an artistic style that, from the beginning, has been less multidisciplinary than omni-disciplinary. “I just wanted to make things, and I always really saw everything as one thing,” he said of art he has made going back to childhood. “I never put any type of hierarchy or structure or any type of importance of one over another. I always saw it all as unified. Even at that age, I wanted to do everything.”

When he happened upon success in the movies, filmmaking was just one of many creative pursuits he followed in his ecstatically slapdash style. “A lot of times I go into the studio because I need an outlet, because other stuff gets too complicated or boring, or something happens and I’ll just need to be in the studio alone, with no one around,” Korine said. “Painting is similar to writing in that there’s something completely direct about the process. When I’m feeling an urge to create something I can’t do in other forms, I’ll go into the studio. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s not.”

In previous phases as a painter, he has worked through different periods with aesthetics ranging from splattery abstraction and hardscrabble psychedelia to figurative takes on distended characters and haunted apparitions. “In the beginning, a lot of it came from drawing and sketching, like cartoons and illustrations,” he said. “I would find something interesting, a little form or something I would then try on canvas. Spontaneous action painting was where I was at. I love the physical act of chasing the energy, but it doesn’t always work out well. And these new paintings are different: these were labor-intensive. For me, a couple of weeks is a long time for one painting. I used to make a show in a week. But whatever I’m trying to achieve dictates the process.”

For new paintings like 6LINX (2023), focused on a masked murderer behind the flash of a firearm, and PARADEEZ (2023), lit up by a speedboat racing across an electric red sea, he worked with assistants in his studio in Miami’s Design District to remake dystopian fever dreams from Aggro Dr1ft in a medium with many centuries of history behind it. “It’s painting over a projection, distorting it a little bit,” he said. “Sometimes it changes on its own. The film took a lot of time, a lot of post-production work and a lot of experimentation, with a lot of people involved. This was pretty simple: just paint on canvas.”

Thinking back to why he has long turned to painting when there are more movies to be made, Korine said, “There are a lot of things I couldn’t say in films, so I would want to make paintings. There were things I didn’t want to have to explain, so I would turn it into an artwork.”

Asked to explain what kinds of things he hasn’t wanted to explain, he averred, “The films I make are an attempt to make something that is beyond my ability to articulate. I feel compelled to tell a story, but I don’t exactly know why. Painting is an even more extreme version of that. It’s more immediate, and I don’t have to explain anything in a narrative way. Sometimes it comes from just seeing a color or a character. A lot of the time, to be honest, I’m working on my phone, on painting apps and drawing things with my fingers. That’s usually how it works: turning pictures into images, and turning images into paintings.”

“HE HASN’T CHANGED A LOT—he was full of energy, and he had a million ideas,” Aaron Rose said of first meeting Korine in the early ’90s at his Alleged Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. Korine hadn’t yet found stardom with Kids, but he was a memorable sprite from the start after moving from Nashville to go to New York University. Rose recalled him describing in detail an exhibition idea he was mulling that has since been lost to time. “I remember being struck by how bold it was that he would walk in and not ask to check out his drawings but immediately propose a fully realized installation,” Rose said.

Korine’s early success in movies—he was not yet 20 when he was commissioned to write the script for Kids—set him up to follow peculiar muses into uncharted territory, as an artist and a personality both. “There was always a part of him that was rooted in performance art and street theater,” Rose remembered. “He would embody characters and become them fully. I’d never met anyone like that before.”

Neither had David Letterman, who hosted Korine for a running string of TV appearances on The Late Show that began with the release of Kids (when Korine claimed to have conceived the movie as a sequel to Caddyshack) and ended four years later with rumors (which may or may not be true) of backstage misdeeds involving Meryl Streep. The small-screen vignettes—with Korine coming off as a sort of antic vaudevillian prankster spinning absurdist yarns—did as much as anything to establish his public persona, which he put into play in an art world receptive to his energy.

“As Zaha Hadid once said, there should be no end to experimentation, and that’s very true for Harmony,” said curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who first met Korine in Paris in the ’90s and included one of his new video works in “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age,” an exhibition he organized for the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. “What brings it together,” Obrist said of Korine’s multivalent practice, “is that there is really no end.”

Obrist got to know Korine through a mutual friend, fashion designer agnès b., who took in the artist in Paris during a time when he was burned out from filmmaking, and strung out on drugs. (“She’s like my fairy godmother,” Korine told me.)

“He wanted to escape from New York. He said he was bored,” said b., who published an issue of her magazine Point d’ironie with him (featuring sensuous blurry photos of “boys fucking and sucking each other,” as Korine wrote in a press release at the time) and showed his work in several exhibitions at her Galerie du jour (including a 2003 show that featured a drawing of Osama bin Laden posing affectionately with E.T.).

“I think he’s a great poet, and a very great artist,” b. told me. “There is something tender about him. He has grey hair now, but he still has childish eyes.”

Gallerist Jeffrey Deitch remembers Korine from the downtown New York scene in the ’90s and recently worked with him on a painting show at his gallery in Miami in 2021. “There is a world particular to Harmony that is based in reality but extends into an extreme,” Deitch said. “What interests me the most is where the lines between what is reality and what is fantasy blur, and basically disappear.”

The Deitch presentation featured works that revolve around Korine’s recurring character Twitchy, who, according to a show description, “functions as a surrogate for the artist’s own mischievous personality.” (Korine himself wrote in a mission statement: “These light creatures hang out with dogs, or dance on the abandoned boat dock. I would sit outside alone by the water and create alien-like friends on a low-key cosmic tropical playground.”)

“He’s a more mature person now—he’s not the kind of person who sets his home on fire,” Deitch said, alluding to tales of multiple house fires (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) that Korine has made part of his ever-evolving life story. “But he’s retained this childlike manner, and he continues to have access to a childlike sense of wonder—and a childlike perversity. He’s not like artists who had their brilliance extinguished by art school pushing them into an academic mode. He never had that, and that makes his work fresher and more interesting.”

Artist Rita Ackermann, an old friend for whom Korine once conducted an imaginary interview published in a book of hers (first line: “rita it’s so nice to bump into you like this on the streets of the Philippines”) called him the “funniest human being I ever met—a nonstop prankster enfant terrible with the biggest heart.”

KORINE’S BIOGRAPHY DOES NOT LACK for fertile settings and milieus. As the story goes, he was born in Northern California to hippie parents (agnès b. recalled him talking about watching his mother give birth to his sister on the beach). As a kid, he moved to Nashville (home of his favorite shopping-mall ninja shop). Then came college and star-making ascendance in New York, followed by respite in Paris, some time back in Nashville (where he hung out with the likes of William Eggleston), and a move to where he lives and works now: Miami.

“I like the idea of Florida against everything,” Korine said. “I think it’s the greatest place in the world. If you say something is set in Florida, it’s automatically science-fiction. You can believe anything. Say the word ‘Florida’ and it’s endless.”

It’s in Florida that Korine has navigated his latest phase change and entered new stages of his career on several fronts. The state’s skin-tingling, mind-melting environs have played home to his latest movies, starting with the bikini-clad-gangster-girl fantasia Spring Breakers and moving on to The Beach Bum, which stars Matthew McConaughey as a mystical poet named Moondog who cavorts with a cast of characters including Snoop Dogg (playing a rapper named Lingerie).

It’s also where Korine has taken a next step as a visual artist whose paintings and other works continue to evolve. He insisted there was nothing especially momentous about his move from Gagosian to Hauser & Wirth, two of the biggest galleries in the world. “I just had been there for a little while and thought it was a great time to switch up,” he said. “And I love the spaces here—I think this is their most-banging space”—referring to Hauser & Wirth’s downtown Los Angeles location in a sprawling former flour factory, with different gallery spaces, a feted farm-to-table restaurant (Manuela’s), and even a coop for chickens in an open-air garden area that serves as a haven for contemplation.

Did the chickens have anything to do with his move?

“You know, I love me some chicken,” he said.

Thinking back over his start in the art world, Korine lit up when recalling points of entry provided by figures he continues to revere. “As a kid just out of high school, I happened to be around this crew of really amazing artists,” he said about early relationships he struck up with the likes of Mike Kelley, Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, and Paul McCarthy. “That was my introduction to how an artist functioned. When you don’t really know how an artist lives—the relationship between life and work, where one thing begins and another ends—it’s interesting to see how people wake up, eat breakfast, and then go to the studio. I was like, That’s actually a job?! I grew up around dudes, like, washing cars. All of that was popping off at the same time, and it didn’t seem as serious as it got later—people still seemed to be having fun.”

As much as Korine has had ready access to multiple means for making art, he said he still feels restless, especially now. “I just try to entertain myself. I get so bored and just need to see what’s out there—like, what comes after all of this,” he said. “That’s what I’m searching for. That’s why I set up EDGLRD.”

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Unveiled this past summer when news of Aggro Dr1ft was announced, EDGLRD is an ambitious new “creative lab and art collective” conceived to make movies, video games, clothing, wearable masks in whose eyes content can be projected, skateboarding gear, digital avatars and accessories, and many other things still in various embryonic stages. In September, the Miami-based enterprise employed around 30 people, and Korine said he planned for it to grow. “It’s difficult to articulate, but I know there are new forms coming. I honestly feel like we’re at the end of something and the beginning of something else,” he said. “There is this kind of singularity popping up in the meshing of music and films and art and gaming. We’re starting to see things coalesce, and the way people are enjoying or taking in entertainment has completely shifted. Now, it’s not just about one thing directly—you’re watching, you’re listening, you’re playing two things at once, you have filters on and avatars. This whole vapor world is starting to rise up.”

The company—which Korine started with a few partners, including a private-equity investor who is also president of the board of The Paris Review—has high-tech applications involving AI and as-yet-untapped platforms for both making and creating content of different kinds. But it began with a simple prompt, Korine said: “How can we assemble an interesting group of kids, game developers, hackers, and designers, and then be like, I have this idea: where can we go? Is it possible to do this? No, not yet, but we can do this. It’s always the creative before the tech. Is there a way to make aesthetic drugs? You can create worlds now, both physical and digital, and tech is advancing in such a way that it’s almost parallel to dreams. For me, it’s the first time I’ve felt like the relationship between tech and dreams is even.”

EDGLRD was conceived to be a highly collaborative entity. “Collaboration is how I’ve always functioned,” Korine said. “On the film side, that’s just the way you make things. Even if you’re completely visionary and take an auteurist’s stance—one person, one idea, one vision—you’re still collaborating in the end. I’m used to that. But this is something else, because I’m trying to develop something that doesn’t exist. I definitely need to be around people.”

But latitude and creative freedom are part of the model. “Harmony is someone who lets people work. He’s not obsessively looking over every detail,” said Joao Rosa, a cofounder and head of production for EDGLRD who worked closely with Korine on Aggro Dr1ft and other visual-effects-intensive projects currently in the works.

Korine said he has already made another movie to follow Aggro Dr1ft called Baby Invasion. “It’s close to a horror film in some ways, and close to a first-person shooter game, mostly told through GoPros and security-cam footage,” he said. But he hopes to give the tools that EDGLRD is developing to other creators too. “I’ll make a couple more, but then I’m going to step back and let the kids use the tech and VFX and gaming engines and stuff like that,” he said. “I’m so curious to see how other people start to use this.”

IN A ROOM OVERLOOKING his show at Hauser & Wirth, Korine kicked back while talking about his favorite kind of cigar (Padron Family Reserve No. 46 Maduro, from Nicaragua) and how he went about choosing images from Aggro Dr1ft to rework into new forms hanging on the walls around him. “There’s no science to anything, and I’m not always right. A lot of it is instinctive, the same as everything,” he said. “It’s like when you look at something and it pops, and you’re like, What if I did X, Y, and Z to it and pushed it into something that’s hyperreal? I always want to go beyond meaning and closer to something like a vibration, something that has a physical component to it.”

At the opening the night before, gallerygoers had sipped drinks like the Florida Man (blueberry-rested mezcal, vermouth, lemon, African basil) out by the chicken coop when a mysterious sight streaked across the darkening sky, causing half the people around me to seize up in fear of apocalypse while the other half remained blasé about what they said was obviously a SpaceX launch of something or other. (Reports later identified it as a US Space Force rocket launch from a base some 160 miles away.)

The gallery was quieter the next day, save for snippets of electronic music playing on repeat as part of a video work with two double-sided monitors showing a few seconds of Aggro Dr1ft in a sort of micro-movie medium. “I’ve never been a big fan of video art that goes on and on, but there’s something interesting in isolating 10 seconds of a beautiful moment and having it endlessly melt into itself,” said Korine. “It’s like loop music, trance music, like rave cinema.”

Thinking through the many means he has enlisted to express himself as an artist, I asked if he could identify any through line or aesthetic allegiance across his decades of work. He did not pause. “I’m just like a child. It’s arrested development,” Korine said. “The same things that made me laugh when I was 12 are the things that make me laugh now. I like the same kinds of things. I really haven’t even probably evolved at all. I work more, but my sensibility and my sense of joy is tapped into the 12-year-old moron. The most base shit is what makes me happy.”

The paintings around him, by no means base with their troubled-over surfaces and luminous hues, suggested other sensibilities at play. I asked, amid so many other modes of making, where painting falls on the spectrum for him: Is it an anachronistic curiosity, or is there something in the timelessness of it that goes beyond? “I like the rules that are set up with it,” he said. “And just when you think there’s nothing else left and nowhere else you can go, something happens, and it changes. Rap music is like that too, and horror films. Those and painting are like the only things where you are allowed to be transgressive, and deconstruct. There’s no fixed point—it’s constantly becoming something else.”

A few minutes later, a photographer showed up at the gallery to shoot Korine’s portrait for this story. Not one to find comfort in standing still, he got an urge and started to move his feet, working his way into a fit of tap-dancing, as he is wont to do. “I always wanted to be a Nicholas brother,” he said, referring to the dancing duo who lit up the silver screen in the ’30s and ’40s in movies like Stormy Weather (especially with their routine  to “Jumpin’ Jive” as played by Cab Calloway).

His feet went fleet and kept moving until whatever he was hearing in his head stopped. Looking over the results of the shoot after, Korine seemed pleased. “That’s OG, right there,” he said. “We got some OG shit up in this Art in America!”  

This article appears under the title “Adventures in the Vapor World” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 88–95.