Karl Haendel, (born 1976, New York City) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Haendel is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York and Wentrup Gallery, Berlin.
Education
Haendel received a bachelor's degree in Art Semiotics and Art History from Brown University in 1998. He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and 2000 respectively. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California Los Angeles in 2003 where he studied with John Baldessari, Mary Kelly, and Paul McCarthy.
Work
Haendel's practice focuses on the appropriation and recontextualization of visual signifiers through photorealistic drawing. His drawings, while often direct copies of photographs, are also composed at a markedly larger scale; transforming the quickness of composing a photograph with the manual labor required to produce drawings that often exceed 10 feet. Removing images from the original context, Haendel presents a new visual language and criticism on contemporary sociocultural relationships. "Though his work may cause us to debate the value of the original versus the copy, Haendel prefers not to situate his work on that familiar ground. Instead, he focuses on how a chain of iteration..." He “appropriates, copies, and re-makes images into new representations,” to “engage the long process of language building.”
Haendel describes his role as an artist to “honestly present a vision of the world that he…believes to be true.” For Haendel, this conviction is the ethical underpinning of his practice. He defines himself in opposition to “the social artist, who cannot see how his identity is produced.”
Exhibitions
Haendel has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the New Museum, NY; and the Guggenheim Museum, NY. His works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, LA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.
Two years after graduating from UCLA, Haendel had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2005. David Pagel described Haendel's work in this exhibition as that of a “detached observer, an armchair sociologist more interested in pointing out the irrationality of society's crass values than in risking failure to shake things up.” In a later review of the show, Jody Zellen described Haendel as a “smart artist.” “He has the skills as well as the know how to make intelligent, beautiful, and well-designed works of art...He appropriates the strategies of appropriation and installation, while also acknowledging conceptualism, minimalism, and the power of political art.”
Haendel was also included in the 2004 and 2008 California Biennials at the Orange County Museum of Art and Prospect II, New Orleans in 2011.
In 2010, Haendel was commissioned to design an installation for the lobby of the Lever House. The installation featured his “signature, stunning graphite drawings on paper--one series depicting cracked light bulbs, mirrors, and eggs; another, the fortunes from fortune cookies; another, abstractions that riff on Mondrian’s “Boogie-Woogie” series—all of which covered two 20-foot-long walls that cross the building's famed glass lobby.”
In 2011 Haendel exhibited his first film, “Questions for my father,” made in collaboration with filmmaker Petter Ringbom. The film “evolved from a series of large graphite word-drawings of the same title that Mr. Haendel...directed at his own father.” The film features 16 men in their 30s and early 40s, including the artist and filmmaker. “Each man makes repeat appearances, looking directly into the camera and asking a short, pithy question that, it doesn’t take long to realize, are intended for the speaker’s absent male parent. The questions imply a full-spectrum of emotions, from tenderness to curiosity to anger, and speak volumes about one of the most primal of relationships.” The film was shown in 2012 The Box Theater at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.
In 2013, Haendel produced a new installation, “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead,” for the 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France, curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran. The installation is made up of approximately 60 drawings which focus on themes of gun violence, sexual difference, technological fetishism, and power structures.