Karl Haendel
Karl Haendel showed work at an open studio in March 2012. Haendel is a New York-born artist living and working in Los Angeles. He makes drawings, large-scale installations, films, and books, and his uncanny facility with graphite is informed by a cagy picture editor’s view of the printed world. Haendel’s drawings are hand-made reproductions of found images that capture the essence of their subject in a straightforward manner yet suggest a wry, unspoken running commentary. Scale is up for grabs, and the odd, funny, formal, or graphically charged subjects subvert obvious meaning and might just as easily refer to a personal narrative as a critique of mass consumption.
Haendel attended Brown University, participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, and received his MFA from University of California at Los Angeles. A solo exhibition of his work was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2005, and Haendel has also been included in 100 Drawings, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center (1999); California Biennial at Orange County Museum of Art (2004 and 2008); Lines, Grids, Stains, Words, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); and This is Killing Me, Mass MOCA (2009).