# The Armory Show 2026 | Booth 223

URL: https://vielmetter.com/fairs/the-armory-show-2026/
September 24 — 27, 2026 · Artists: Karl Haendel

Installation photo credit: Dawn Blackman

**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.