VIP Preview: Thursday, September 24
Public Days: Friday, September 25 — Sunday, September 27, 2026
Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a solo presentation of new works by Karl Haendel for this year’s edition of The Armory Show.
Karl Haendel’s photorealistic drawings recontextualize found images, shifting meaning through formal manipulation, framing, and scale. Blending technical precision and dry humor, Haendel reproduces images sourced from news media, pop culture, and the artist’s own photographs. Haendel’s drawings employ a range of approaches to mark-making, from painstakingly detailed mimetic rendering, to handwritten text and faithful facsimiles of line drawings and scribbles.
Paper is treated as both a tactile material and a pictorial space: notes are periodically scrawled in the margins of an otherwise pristine image, a flaw in the surface is methodically cut out, and a larger-than-life drawing spans several connected sheets stapled directly to the wall. Haendel exploits the medium’s elasticity and economy, enlarging images to many times their actual size without sacrificing precision or clarity, and adhering to realism without suppressing innuendo and wit.
This mining of the image does not stop when the drawing is finished; Haendel is equally concerned with the installation of the works and their relationships to the space, the viewer, and to each other. Works are often physically manipulated to respond to the context in which they are placed, eschewing traditional gallery hanging for densely arranged and cerebral installations that speak to the content of each drawing, the gaps between the images, and how they are experienced as a group. Emerging from these images is a sense of the artist’s personal and political realities, and a persistent examination of masculinity, self-doubt, and loss.
About the artist
Karl Haendel was born in 1976 in New York and now 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 To Share a Stomach, at The Brick, Los Angeles, CA (2026); Into the Time Horizon, at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2026); On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Period of Time, at the University Art Gallery, UC Irvine, Irvine (2024); 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 Glass half, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2026); Blind Faith, Hope, Pandora’s Box, Messiahs, at the Wentrup Gallery, Berlin (2025); Less Bad, at the Frederick Weisman Museum, Pepperdine University, Malibu (2025), Kimball Art Center, Park City (2024); Love and Capital, at 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 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. He recently opened a commission by Metro Los Angeles at the new Wilshire and Fairfax station.
