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.
After graduating, Korman shared a Lower East Side studio space with artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Charles Simonds and soon received recognition through exhibitions at The Institute of Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1) and Guggenheim Museum ("10 Young Artists – Theodoron Awards") in 1971, a Whitney Annual (1972) and Biennial (1973), and a one-person exhibition at LoGiudice Gallery (1972).
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. She has also been included in the Whitney Biennial 1995, the international traveling exhibition, "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" (2006–8), and shows at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, National Academy Museum, and MoMA PS1.
In addition to her art career, Korman has taught in the Fine Arts Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology since 1989; she has also served on the faculties at Queens College and Virginia Commonwealth University. 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. She emerged in the wake of Minimalist and Conceptualist critiques of the painting tradition as "dead," but rejected them and embraced its legacy and limitations (e.g., the two-dimensional rectangle, flatness) as challenges. Her paintings employ frank, direct processes and often oscillate between fragmentation and wholeness, improvisation and structure. 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. In subsequent work, she has experimented with livelier color, loose grids, geometries of interlocking shapes, and canvases with symmetrical subdivided formats, often based on drawings.
Early process paintings
Korman's early paintings (1969–75) investigate subtle gestural problems and compositional means that break with modernist tradition, using predetermined processes of addition and subtraction and loose grid structures. 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.