Harriet Korman

Harriet Korman has painted abstractly for the past four decades, continually fascinated by what can be expressed without recognizable imagery or associations. Her work engages geometry, order, and connections. The nature of the oilstick, which Korman uses with the aid of paper towels to spread the pigment into large areas, and to make the lines more substantial, aids the flexible and spontaneous process of drawing. This approach yields a wide variety of divisions, shapes, and organizations. Often finding her drawings (sometimes the ones she judges least successful) to be good subjects for paintings, she enjoys the interpolation between the two media. The differences between drawing and painting resulted in very different outcomes of the same two-dimensional exploration. 

Harriet Korman was born in 1947 and studied at Queens College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her early exhibitions took place at the Galerie Ricke in Cologne, Lo Guidice Gallery in New York, Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles and the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in San Francisco. Her work was featured in the Ten Young Artists- Theodoron Awards at the Guggenheim Museum (1971) and in the Whitney Annual (1972) and Whitney Biennial (1973 and 1995). Her work was included in High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75, an exhibition that traveled to museum venues in the United States, Germany and Mexico (2006-2008). In 2007, a curated selection of recent works was shown at MoMA PS1 in New York. Korman has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Museum, the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo Residency, the Edward Albee Foundation, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the National Academy Museum of which she is also a member, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Korman is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology.