Karl Haendel (artist)

Karl Haendel, (born 1976, New York, NY) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.[1]

Haendel received a bachelor's degree in Art Semiotics from Brown University in 1998. 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.

"Haendel arranges his drawings in salon-style installations to foster powerful juxtapositions of references, often specifically quoting American culture." 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. The impact of this "scaling up" is particularly present in work like "Thumbprint #1- 6," 2002–2004 where a photograph of his own thumbprint left behind on a small drawing is reproduced in a new drawing at a scale of 109" x 84". " "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 ...transforms a particular image." He “appropriates, copies, and re-makes images into new representations,” to “engage the long process of language building.” “His exacting drawings are the idioms that he deploys to assemble his syntactical, room-filling installations and architectural display conceits.”

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.”

Haendel has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the New Museum, NY; and the Guggenheim Museum, NY.

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