Vielmetter Los Angeles invites you to join us on Saturday, June 28th at 2:00pm for a conversation between artist Karl Haendel and art historian Andy Campbell on the occasion of Haendel’s newest book Great Ass at The Met published by Triangle Books. Copies will be available for purchase.
Great Ass at The Met reproduces the complete series of drawings Karl Haendel made after a visit to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, iPhone in hand, looking for the best male asses of antiquity. The New York born artist, known for his practice of expanding the language of contemporary drawing, made the pencil on paper works from the photos he took on his Met cruise, after recognizing that they looked a lot like, well, butt pics–the lingua franca of contemporary nudes.
The book includes a cheeky (but scholarly) essay by art historian Andy Campbell, that explores relationships between classical statuary, homosocial encounters, modern bodybuilding culture, contemporary masculinity, and butt selfies (aka, belfies), as well as what is believed to be a first for an art monograph, a section devoted to glute work-out tips, penned by NUNZI, a personal trainer and butt influencer, known online by millions for his luscious peach.
Karl Haendel was born in 1976 in New York and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Brown University in 1998 before attending the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003.
His work has been included in various biennials and institutional group shows such as Cowboy at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2023); 100 Drawings from Now at The Drawing Center, New York (2020); Copines-Copains-Berlin at Wentrup Gallery, Berlin (2019); Game On! at the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa (2017); Manifest Intention: Drawing In All Its Forms at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Torino, Italy (2014); the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York; and the 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2013).
Recent exhibitions include Less Bad, at the Frederick Weisman Museum, Pepperdine University, Malibu (2025), Kimball Art Center, Park City (2024); Love and Capital, Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin (2024); Daily Act of Sustained Empathy at Vielmetter Los Angeles (2023); Praise New York at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2022); Praise Berlin at Wentrup Gallery, Berlin (2022); Feeble Synapse at Sommer Contemporary art, Tel Aviv (2021); Mazel Tov Group at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Pink Cup and the Facts at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (with Jay DeFeo) (2017); Karl Haendel and Tony Lewis at LAXArt, Los Angeles (with Tony Lewis) (2016); and Weeks in Wet Sheets at Barbara Seiler, Zurich (2015).
His works are in many public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Andy Campbell is a historian of art and design whose work privileges archives as wellsprings of engaged communal histories and artistic energies. In his first academic book, Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art, he stressed the fragility and profundity of such community archives; and in edited volumes like Queer Communion: Ron Athey (compiled with Amelia Jones and listed as one of the “Best Art Books of 2020” by The New York Times), he positions participants, witnesses, and co-conspirators as expert voices in reviewing Athey’s singular practice. He is the curator of the forthcoming retrospective Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck (originating with Blaffer Art Museum (Houston) and opening at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Fall 2026), and he is currently working on a text / lecture series considering the pressures of poverty on artistic practices. He is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, and lives in Gardena, CA.