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For more than three decades, Harmony Korine has made a career out of turning American unease into image, noise, and mood. Whether through the bruised youth-world of Kids, the feral wreckage of Gummo, or the neon-hallucinatory fever of his more recent work, Korine has always occupied that slippery zone where subculture, trash, myth, and art-house provocation collapse into one another. Now, ICA Miami is staging Perfect Nonsense, the artist and filmmaker’s first museum survey in the US.
Opening April 15 and running through October 4, 2026, the exhibition brings together more than 50 works across painting, drawing, collage, photography, zines, film, and notes, mapping a practice that has never respected disciplinary boundaries in the first place. Rather than trying to clean Korine up for institutional consumption, the show appears to lean into the friction that has always defined him: adolescent menace, outsider psychology, celebrity rot, class tension, warped Americana, and the strange theatre of growing up in the US.
According to ICA Miami, the exhibition follows the full arc of Korine’s image-making, stretching from early handmade material produced around the mid-90s to his newer experiments with digital environments and gaming aesthetics. That means viewers can expect juvenilia, paintings, scribbled ideas, and fragments of the psychic debris that has long fed his films, but also later works that push deeper into distortion, abstraction, and synthetic image culture.
Among the works featured are the eerie “Twitchy” paintings, where low-res phone imagery gets dragged into something more ghostly and painterly, as well as a “Florida Room” that reflects on Miami as both lived environment and aesthetic condition. There’s also work tied to Trash Humpers, plus the collaborative “Shadow Fux” paintings made with Rita Ackermann — reminders that Korine’s world has always thrived on contamination: high and low, stupid and profound, abject and seductive.
The exhibition reportedly closes with material connected to Aggro Dr1ft, Korine’s infrared, game-adjacent plunge into what he has described elsewhere as a new kind of “post-cinema”. Starring Travis Scott, the project pushed his long-running interest in fractured spectatorship even further, swapping conventional narrative for something more immersive, hostile, and chemically unsteady. In that sense, Perfect Nonsense doesn’t read like a neat retrospective so much as a museum trying to keep up with an artist who has spent years mutating in public.
What makes Korine’s work endure is that it rarely asks to be resolved. It lingers in bad taste, in damaged beauty, in dead zones between sincerity and parody. His images can feel funny, ugly, tender, embarrassing, and vaguely threatening all at once. That tension is exactly what has kept him compelling, even as culture catches up to the visual language he’s been mining for years: lo-fi decay, chaotic adolescence, unstable identity, the spectacle of American emptiness.
With Perfect Nonsense, ICA Miami is framing Korine not just as a filmmaker who occasionally makes art, but as a restless image-maker whose whole output belongs to the same diseased ecosystem. It’s a fitting institutional debut for someone who has always treated culture less like a discipline than a dump site to dig through.