Harmony Korine

Harmony Korine has developed a wide-ranging practice over the last three decades that spans film, painting, sculpture and fashion, all unified by a distinctive combination of improvisation, humor, repetition, nostalgia and poetry. Moving freely between mediums, Korine continually invents imaginative new visual languages that resist easy categorization. Across his varied oeuvre, each body of work unfolds with its own formal and emotional lexicon.

This November, Korine carries his genre-defying worldbuilding into new territory with UX LAM an exhibition of new paintings for his debut with Hauser & Wirth New York. This presentation follows ‘Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense,’ the artist’s first US museum survey, presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2026.

In a departure from earlier infrared-inspired canvases, Korine approaches these works through a lambent pastel palette and a renewed engagement with the language of drawing, suggesting a new chapter in his practice. Each painting begins in the digital realm: the artist uses gaming infrastructure as a staging ground, building and composing images inside the software before approaching the canvas. The exhibition’s title combines an abbreviation for ‘user experience’—‘UX’—with the name of the character pictured in the show’s titular painting— ‘LAM’—suggesting not only the construction of a virtual environment but the sensory experience of inhabiting one. Korine’s initial digital designs, a process he uses in lieu of traditional sketching, have evolved into dreamlike worlds on canvas, filled with saturated colors and enigmatic characters, synthetic yet strangely alive. The spectral avatars that populate the paintings have been built up from layers of intricate individual marks resembling crosshatching, lending them a tactile quality that contrasts with their cybernated appearance.

Korine’s compositions bring a confrontational edge to otherwise classical arrangements of figures—his characters meet the viewer’s eyes directly, with a bright yet vacant gaze that disrupts the traditional one-way dynamic of looking between viewer and subject. The composition of ‘UX SWitcHY’ (2026) recalls a ‘selfie’ style portrait, with the central figure appearing to turn a camera toward himself as the landscape behind him blurs with the motion of his hand. The gesture gives the scene a sense of immediacy, as though the viewer is witnessing the moment as it unfolds rather than looking at a fixed image of something that has already happened.

Across the exhibition, shifts in perspective draw viewers into Korine’s constructed environments, transforming them from observers into participants. The paintings become encounters, dissolving boundaries between screen and painted surface, analog and digital, and between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. This sense of immersion reflects Korine’s broader interest in creating works that are ‘more like an experience,’ where, as he has put it, ‘maybe the movie doesn’t end.’

Video games have long fed Korine’s imagination. Recalling his early interest in the medium in a 2023 conversation with historian Isabelle Graw, he observed that ‘[v]ideo games seemed more and more appealing to me because they create entire worlds.’ The paintings that emerge from Korine’s exchange between digital and analog forms capture both a stylized world and something harder to name: an essence, a charge, a feeling. They are paintings but also fragments of a vast virtual environment that extends beyond the edge of the canvas, asking the viewer to contemplate possible alternatives to our comfortably familiar physical world.

Harmony Korine is admired internationally for the improvisation, humor, repetition, nostalgia and poetry that unite the disparate aspects of his output. His work is 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.’

Korine’s work has been exhibited at institutions worldwide, including the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium (2000); Whitney Biennial, New York (2000); CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2001); Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower, Mito, Japan (2002); 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany (2009); Swiss Institute, New York (2010); Casino Luxembourg–Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg (2013); Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville (2009); the Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville (2016); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017).