Who Are Harmony Korine, Ralph Iwamoto, and John Wesley’s New Galleries?

Artist and cult-classic filmmaker Harmony Korine was among the noteworthy new signings last month. The director of Gummo (1997) and Spring Breakers (2012) joined Hauser & Wirth from Gagosian.

The gallery’s president, Marc Payot, described Korine’s films and ‘Mistakist art’ as ‘a sort of real-time psychoanalysis of contemporary America’.

Korine is the second major movie director to sign to a mega dealer gallery in recent months, after David Lynch joined Pace in November last year.

Another big move came from Hollis Taggart, who just days ago announced their representation of the estate of Japanese-American painter Ralph Iwamoto (1927–2013).

Hollis Taggart’s first exhibition of Iwamoto’s work is entitled Wild Growth: Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works from 1955, and takes place in New York from 23 March to 15 April. Surrealist works inspired by the flora and fauna of Hawaii, Iwamoto’s home state, are the focal point of the show.

Iwamoto hasn’t received as much attention as some believe he deserves.

‘Ralph was a person who simply did not toot his own horn,’ explained Jeffrey Wechsler, former Curator at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.

Pace has taken on the estate of American painter John Wesley—whose work has become closely associated with that of Donald Judd—in cooperation with his gallery of 27 years, Fredericks & Freiser.

Wesley’s practice straddles the lineages of both pop art and minimalism as his flattened two dimensional figurations used mass media aesthetics to make commentary on American culture from the 1960s to 1980s.

Also: Yogyakarta-based Roby Dwi Antono, whose macabre illustrations echo Yoshitomo Nara, joined Almine Rech; Florence Peake joined Richard Saltoun Gallery; and Venezuelan-American painter Loriel Beltrán joined Lehmann Maupin.

John Miller, known for his object assemblages coated with gold or thick brown impasto, joined Various Small Fires; Mozambique artist Cassi Namoda joined 303 Gallery; and Arghavan Khosravi, who is known for her Persian-miniature inspired 3D wall works, joined Stems Gallery in Brussels. —[O]

Main image: Harmony Korine. © Harmony Korine. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: Rachel Korine.