Harriet Korman

Harriet Korman (born 1947) is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.

Korman has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Rufino Tamayo and MoMA PS1, among other institutions. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.

Early life and career Korman was born in 1947 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She studied art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Queens College (BA, 1969), where she received a fairly traditional, observation-based education in painting. In her final year, however, she encountered the contemporary work of artists such as Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Lee Lozano, which shifted her focus toward a new painting language based on process and untethered to realistic observation or tradition.

In subsequent decades, Korman has had exhibitions at Galerie Ricke in Cologne; the Willard Gallery (1976–87), Lennon, Weinberg (1992–2019) and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York; Jancar Gallery (Los Angeles) and Daniel Weinberg Gallery (San Francisco and Los Angeles); Texas Gallery (Houston); and Häusler Contemporary (Munich), among others. Korman lives and works in New York City with her husband, artist John Mendelsohn.

Work and reception Korman's work is consistent in terms of thought and inquiry rather than a signature style, motif, process or movement. In her early series, Korman—and others such as Jennifer Bartlett, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann and Joan Snyder—sought to reduce mark-making and gesture to the essential in deceptively simple works. Her first three New York solo exhibitions (1972–6) largely featured paintings in which she drew parallel lines, dots, dashes or numbers in crayon (sometimes forming shapes), covered them over with a layer of white gesso, and then scraped with emphatic, varying marks using a palette knife to bring together the two layers. Stephen Westfall commended her experimentation in a review of her 1984 exhibition (Willard Gallery), which he described as a "surprisingly warm combination" of witty, slightly ragged touch, rigorous planarity and vivid, emotionally colored ideas. She retained certain aspects—loose organizing principles and frankly evident processes—while introducing a vibrant palette, fleet paint application, and greater movement among styles.

Painting (1997–present) Korman's black-and-white series provided insights that she applied to her next, color series: she would paint without white, which can create illusions of light and space. These paintings explore the way color and abstract images convey meaning. —contemporary yet lightly echoing Miró, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Tantric Art—and independent of nostalgia and ongoing discourses reviving or rejecting modernism.

In her subsequent exhibition (Lennon, Weinberg, 2008) Korman exhibited paintings alongside the (black-and-white) line drawings that generated them for the first time. These paintings introduced wavering patches of grids and parallel lines—harkening back to early work—into her interlocking shapes, creating a sense of shifting configurations, like a kaleidoscope. The paintings differ from preceding work by including areas of plain white paint and colored lines and outlines of varying width.

Korman's work belongs to the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum for Modern Art (MMK) in Frankfort, Germany, Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, Joslyn Art Museum, Maier Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Museum Pfalzgalerie (Germany), Tang Museum, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.