Harriet Korman
«Developing Format – Paintings and Drawings 2010–2014»

Opening:
Thursday, March 19, 2015 | 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition:
until May 23, 2015

Häusler Contemporary proudly presents for the first time works by American painter Harriet Korman. This exciting artist who found her way of handling color and form in the 1960s when she was a student at Queens College in New York is to be rediscovered in Europe. At her first solo exhibition at Häusler Contemporary Harriet Korman shows recent paintings of the past four years as well as an exclusive selection of rarely seen oil crayon drawings. 

Saturated, strong colors emanate from the geometrically structured paintings of Harriet Korman (*1947, lives in New York). The works on view selected from the past four years represent the current creative period of a painter that has been developing her work continuously over more than four decades. From the beginning of her career starting with her first exhibition at Galerie Ricke in Cologne 1970, Korman focused on abstract painting based on a few selected aspects. In the 1960s Abstract Expressionism still resonated throughout the art scene whereas Minimal and Pop Art opposed with new impulses. In between these poles, Korman adopted simplicity as her own prime principle. She dedicated herself to perpetually explore the picture plane at a time when others proclaimed the «abandoning of the picture». In the past, her paintings thus assumed different qualities, at times very painterly, at other times dominated by organic forms. Currently, geometry and a mathematically based division of the canvas is most appropriate for expressing the artists principles. 


There are several options for exploring the works in our exhibition. Only at first sight do they look severe, at the second and every further glance, they always provide surprises. First of all, there’s the color that radiates from Harriet Korman’s paintings in a peculiar clarity. The explanation for this phenomenon lies in the fact that Korman has not been mixing any white in her colors for more than 20 years now. So while looking at these paintings, the viewer faces color in its purest, most intense form, and mainly primary and secondary colors along with tones of brown. In some pictures, the paint application is very even, in other works the brush stroke is clearly visible which provides the paintings with depth and movement. The lines too are not totally straight, the guiding hand of the artist can be recognized and the supposed severity thus is eased again. There is another possibility in attending to these paintings: follow the lines and decipher the geometrical structure that underlies them. The structure of all works in the show starts out being symmetrical. In three works of 2013 it is a centered diamond, in other pieces created between 2010 and 2012 diagonals play an important role that cross subareas of the picture. The different resulting sections though are colored in such a way that the symmetry is repeatedly broken up, the viewer’s eye is guided over the picture plane by different emphases and illuminations. «The less balanced a painting is, the more interesting it is», the artist says.

This processual development of the painting can also be traced in the oil crayon drawings which the artist shows rarely in public and of which an exclusive selection is presented in our exhibition.

Deborah Keller, Häusler Contemporary