HARRIET KORMAN

Though Korman was described ’... as one of New York’s purest abstract painters without a brand’ (John Yau, reviewing her 2020 survey exhibition), there are relationships between the various series in her work. These new paintings have a connection to Korman’s works presented in her widely praised 2018 and 2021 exhibitions. In 2018 she explored a quadrant format, where each quadrant was formulated with bars of random colour, resulting in different patterns, configurations, highlights and surprising outcomes. In her 2021 show the artist used a configuration of concentric rectangles, deciphering and adjusting fast intuitive drawings to necessarily slow paintings, a process she found intriguing.

Korman sometimes employs existing formats she feels she could expand upon in new ways. She describes: ‘In 1988 at a Donald Judd exhibition at the Whitney, looking at a box on the floor, a question came to me—how many ways could I paint a square? I finally got to it—Portraits of Squares.’

For its specific properties and symbolic value, the square has often been the subject of—mainly—modernist art. Though allowing for many allusions, Korman never leaves her own idiom and tries to embody each canvas with as much abstract identity and presence as possible.

Since 1996, Korman has not mixed any white into her colours, although she sometimes uses white as a separate area. Her paintings are completely flat with no references to light, space, or illusionism, reinforcing the fact that a painting is a painting, a two-dimensional surface. However, in exploring the absolute essentials of the medium itself, Korman articulates an archetypal, non-dogmatic space, or, as Katy Siegel already observed in Artforum’s Best of 2001: ’‘Seeing [these stunning, abstract paintings] at Lennon Weinberg was an experience curiously out of time— these are pictures neither burdened with nostalgia nor obviously beholden to current discourses of modernist revival or rejection. Absolutely new, as if they’d always been there.’

Thomas Erben Gallery has been working with Harriet Korman since 2018. Over the past few years, her work has received growing attention, garnering reviews from Roberta Smith for The New York Times, John Yau for Hyperallergic, and Raphael Rubinstein for The Brooklyn Rail, among many others.

Several of her paintings recently entered the Kienzle Art Foundation collection, Berlin, where they were part of a group show with works by Louise Fishman, Gerald Jackson, Jonathan Lasker, David Reed, Gary Stefan, and Jack Witten (2022). Her work was also included in the 30th anniversary exhibition at Carlier Gebauer (2021/22), curated by Dieter Schwarz (former director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur). This interest builds on Korman’s earlier exhibitions with Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne (1970, ‘71 and ‘72), Galerie m, Bochum (1977), and Häusler Contemporary, Munich (2015).

In the U.S., Korman has participated in the Whitney Annual (1972), two Whitney Biennials (1973 and 1995), and was included in Ten Young Artists – The Theodoron Awards at the Guggenheim Museum (1971), as well as the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75 and a three person show at MoMA PS1 (both 2007). Throughout her career, her work has received substantial critical support. She has shown extensively with such galleries as 112 Greene Street, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Willard Gallery, and Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.