In the year before he and his wife and daughter were forced to evacuate their new waterside home for Hurricane Irma, chances are you could find Harmony Korine in a light-filled lingerie shop-turned-art studio perched above some B-side boutiques in Miami’s Design District, puffing on a Cuban cigar and painting “douche boats.”

“There’s so many douchebags here with boats,” explains Korine, who had just returned to Miami from his hometown of Nashville, where he and his family took refuge during the storm. He got inspired to make the watercolor-on-linen works after seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwestern landscapes in the medium at her namesake museum in Santa Fe two years ago. “Making artwork in Florida has such a different context to Nashville, so instead of shying away from it I kind of wanted to dive into it and do a whole series of these yachts, with funny pornographic titles like Malcolm XXX, Doggie Style Day Afternoon, Schindler’s Fist, The Bone Ranger or Ocean’s 11 1⁄2 Inches.” Dubbed Adult Yachting, the new paintings will form the basis for his fourth solo show in as many years with Gagosian Gallery in 2018.

“I love the boats. I got Malcolm XXX for myself and a good friend of mine just bought Rambone,” says Larry Gagosian. “They’re kind of a departure, but kind of not. Harmony is just thumbing his nose at nautical art and it’s a nice sidebar. He doesn’t want to go dark right now and he makes a good point. That’s why Jerry Lewis was so popular in Paris. Harmony has an interesting head; you never know what’s coming next.”

The same might be said of Korine’s fortunes of late: his neon-soaked Daytona Beach crime drama Spring Breakers (2012) was acquired by MoMA last year, and this fall he was the subject of a mid-career retrospective, his largest museum show to date, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show featured paintings, journals, films, photos and scripts dating back to his junior-high years and a special room given over to Korine’s more freelance activities—shooting out TVs; spreading rumors around Hollywood; pulling pranks that got him banned from old haunts like the Late Show with David Letterman.

“Harmony has always been a DJ, trying everything in a very free way, making mistakes, moving towards new horizons or dead ends,” says Alicia Knock, the curator who organized the Pompidou exhibition. “Harmony’s work is strong because it translates a certain type of American vernacular, but it is also so obsessively personal that it defies both history and reality. He is very close to postmodern artists and underground culture but remains an outsider who fights authority, morality and norms in a non-ideological, I would say poetic, way.”

For Gagosian, the show was an eye-opener. In the past he had dealt mainly with Korine’s geometric abstraction because, he says, “I could put it into a vocabulary of abstraction that comes out of minimalism, so I felt more comfortable talking about that and representing it. Some of the figurative work can be messy and aggressive and harsh, and I didn’t like it as much, to be frank, but when I saw this show my whole thing flipped. My respect for him as an artist doubled because I connected the dots and I understood where the paintings were coming from.” The opening was filled with teens and twenty- somethings running up to Korine to take selfies, says Gagosian, adding, “He’s like a super smart kid, and a lot of kids try to do what Harmony does but just don’t have the gift. He’s extremely improvisational, he’s profane, but with Harmony it doesn’t come off as forced or like he’s pandering in any way. It just seems like this is the way he’s wired, and this is the way he sees the world.”