ART CITIES:London-Harmony Korine

Harmony Korine is known as the director of ”Spring Breakers” and for “Kids”, which was his debut film as a screenwriter in 1995, Korine’s films are experiments in suspended disbelief that cite narratives intimately related to his own biography with a sardonic twist. Improvised sequences and unplanned “mistakes” leave breadcrumbs of truth to lead viewers through a maddening reality. Similarly, this approach can be identified in Korine’s paintings as well.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

The title of the exhibition “Fazors” alludes to the “phaser effect”: a musical swirl of oscillating sound that summons the hypno-psychedelic effects informing Korine’s latest series of paintings. The large-scale, concentric circles that characterize this series expand upon the line and checker paintings in their embrace of vibrant color combinations. Inspired by sun motifs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, the series conjures the Color-field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, as well as the color spectrums of Robert Delaunay’s Rhythm painting series. “The patterns and colours in the circle paintings are trance-like and hypnotic, there is no real beginning and no end. The paintings by definition are never ending”. A combination of oilstick, acrylic, and house paint is applied to canvas or, in certain cases, reclaimed artworks from Korine’s prior abstract series. The rings of each orb resemble the ripple effect, fanning out from a ten-sided star in the middle of each composition. The paintings also reveal improvisational marks, fingerprints, and inadvertent mistakes. Korine riffs on each work impulsively and embraces the physical vigor of repetition and pattern on a grand scale. “I’ve never really felt certain in the way things begin or end. It mostly exists in its own time and logic. More like a vision”. The “Fazors” describe a world that expands and contracts like processed sound-the dream merges with the nightmare to envelop the viewer in the shimmer of the absurd.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London, Furation 8/2-24/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com