Harriet Korman

[1][2][3] 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.

[4][5][6] 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.

[21][2][22] 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.

[5][37][38][4] 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.

[25][3] Reviewers described the resulting work as surprisingly compelling given her easily comprehended, simple method; in conceptual terms, they noted Korman's emphasis on arbitrariness and seeming nonchalance about the end product, which ran counter to the more heroic narratives of minimalism.

[5][40][41] Stephen Westfall commended her experimentation in a review of her 1984 exhibition (Willard Gallery), which he described as a "surprisingly warm combination" of witty, slightly ragged touch, rigorous planarity and vivid, emotionally colored ideas.

[27] Critics suggest Korman's late-1980s-to-early-1990s paintings circle back in style to refigure her past by turning the signature Minimalist grid into something loose and tactile, like textile design.

"[5][39] Between 1993 and 1996, Korman turned to mostly black, white and gray canvasses with askew grids and irregular, geometric "compartments" containing densely worked, calligraphic circles, diamonds, stripes, figure-eight and pretzel-like forms, and emblems.

[22] Critics described the work as "curiously out of time"[48]—contemporary yet lightly echoing Miró, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Tantric Art—and independent of nostalgia and ongoing discourses reviving or rejecting modernism.

[34][1] Critics such as Raphael Rubenstein describe an "emphatically handmade" geometry of wavering edges, tapering bands and irregularities in these works, which pulls what appears to be strict modular abstraction (e.g., Albers or early Stella) into the realm of Paul Klee and Mary Heilmann.