Conversations I Intersections in art: the many worlds of worldbuilding

Conversations I Intersections in art: the many worlds of worldbuilding

Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, December 6

Harmony Korine, Artist, Miami
Paul McCarthy, Artist, Los Angeles
Jill Mulleady, Artist, Los Angeles and Paris
Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine

How do worlds emerge (or merge) in different art forms? Harmony Korine’s creative career began in the 1990s in film, a medium with which he both created worlds and reflected the often unconsidered sides of the real worlds around us – his artistic expression has since expanded to painting and video games. Paul McCarthy’s career has spanned artistic genres for decades, and the provocateur has recently moved into AI-generated filmmaking. Jill Mulleady’s paintings pull viewers into her at once familiar and uncanny worlds, and the artist is currently translating her sometimes unsettling narratives and aesthetics into film, video games, and other digital mediums. Together, they will explore worldbuilding in all its forms in a conversation moderated by the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 Conversations program is curated by Kimberly Bradley.

Over the last 30 years, Harmony Korine has cultivated a multidisciplinary art practice that resists categorization and is admired internationally for the improvisation, humor, repetition, nostalgia, and poetry that unite the disparate aspects of his output. His practice is built upon tireless experimentation and a trial-and-error path, producing what Korine calls ‘Mistakist Art.’ Korine’s oeuvre is both deliberate and erratic, figurative and abstract, and, like his films, blurs boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in ways that simultaneously attract and repel viewers with its hypnotic, otherworldly atmosphere.

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multifaceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film, and video, to sculpture, drawing, and painting.

Jill Mulleady was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is based between Los Angeles and Paris. Mulleady works primarily in painting and often intervenes in the spaces where she exhibits, staging the paintings with readymades, sculptures, and architectural installations, exploring themes of memory, transformation, and the power of history. Her practice shifts between close observations of everyday reality and highly elaborated imaginary worlds. These paintings can be seen as allegories for the contemporary experience of the image as interface: not just representing a picture but a means of mobilizing attention, bodies, and affects to connect emotionally and physically in an increasingly virtualized space.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and the senior advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’ in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Obrist’s publications include Ways of Curating (2015); The Age of Earthquakes (2015); Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015); The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021); 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021); Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023); Remember to Dream (2023); and Une vie in progress (2023).
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