#Blockbuster Harmony Korine’s Art Show Is An Ode to VHS

Excerpt via ID
By Arnolt Smead
Oct 4 2018, 6:46am

HARMONY KORINE
BLOCKBUSTER
September 11–October 20, 2018
976 Madison Avenue, New York

Ever since he made a name for himself in the 90’s with the script for Larry Clarks “Kids,” Korine has been honing his craft as a storyteller, constructing a universe and an aesthetic distinctly his own. His movies have taken audiences on surreal trips to the underbelly of American life. He has dreamed up indelible characters, all with a certain car crash allure, burdened by fate and bad decision making, yet determined to keep going. These more disturbing depictions of youth culture reflected Harmony’s personal struggles with depression and drug abuse. But while the bad boy of American cinema has long since grown up or at least turned over a new leaf his movies, his paintings, and his reality are all still connected. They stem from the same wacky mind, which at present seems immersed in the lightness of being.

BLOCKBUSTER inhabits that space as well. It is a series of colorful paintings on discarded VHS tapes and a clear departure from the spellbinding abstractions of sounds and hallucinations that the artist used to make. The ghosts from his past are still there, but they are tellingly contained in boxes. He has turned the gritty and the forlorn into something meaningful. And that is still the ambition behind everything he does: to find beauty in reality, however grim or irreverent it may be.

From the Quarterly

HARMONY KORINE: BLOCKBUSTER

The artist discusses his latest exhibition in New York with the Gagosian Quarterly, telling the story behind the works and their connection to his larger practice.

Read the story vice.com

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