Harmony Korine beyond cinema at the Centre Pompidou

A terrible child of American cinema, Harmony Korine was only 19 when Larry Clark asked him to write his cult film, “Kids”. Immediately propelled to the front of the stage, he quickly signed two major films, “Gummo” (1997) and “Julien Donkey-Boy” (1999) which earned him the recognition of Werner Herzog or Gus Van Sant. The latter even describes “Gummo” as “life-changing”. Like no one before, Korine shows a marginal America, that of the young and the pestiferous, against a backdrop of delirious poetry. Reach by the scandals, it will be necessary to wait until 2013 for his big return with “Spring Breakers”, infernal epic led by an unrecognizable Jared Leto while Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez break with their image of young girls well in all respects. The Centre Pompidou chose this image of the film to illustrate the poster for the exceptional retrospective dedicated to the multifaceted filmmaker and artist, from October 6 to November 5. A real event inaugurated this weekend in the presence of the interested, eternal cool kid now 44 years old, surrounded for the occasion by great names like Larry Gagosian, who exhibited the artist in 2015 in his gallery in Beverly Hills, and co-edited today with the Centre Pompidou and Rizzoli a book on his work. The first retrospective of Harmony Korine’s works in France, the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou shows the diversity of his work. An unexpected opportunity to (re)discover his pictorial work, on screen and on canvas.