Karl Haendel
09 Jun - 02 Jul 2011
KARL HAENDEL
9 June - 2 July 2011
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Karl Haendel’s first solo exhibition in France. It will feature new drawings and works on paper and two installations.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, June 9 from 6-8pm and will be on view until July 2, 2011.
Karl Haendel’s large-scale graphite works are drawings of appropriated images or the artist’s own drawings, words or photographs. He projects them onto large Arche paper and draws their contours, shading and gradations.
On this technique he noted “using projector is a way to change the scale and understand the effect of differently scaled images on the static scale of the human body. The idea of scale suggests that there is a standard size of a certain thing and it’s noticeable when you deviate from it.” 1
Haendel’s drawings can be figurative or abstract and come from various sources: text-based or photorealistic images, scribbles, comics, newspapers or political commentaries.
Haendel arranges these intentionally diverse images in temporary groupings that only exist for his exhibitions.
Works are grouped for their formal links (comparing and contrasting sense of gravity and weight, interior and exterior, light and shadow) or conceptual links, often relating to his personal experience, in order to shift their meaning and symbolic possibilities.
The two installations Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one, You got a way of tearin' the world apart, love, see what you've done. (Sugarbaby #1) and You can’t turn back—you can’t come back, sometimes we push too far. One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are. (Sugarbaby #4) are titled after the lyrics of the song Sugar Baby, recorded in 1927 by Dock Boggs and later sang by Bob Dylan who was greatly influence by Boggs.
These complex structures of intersected graphite and acrylic drawings mounted on boards with 16mm film projections seem to illustrate Greil Marcus's words on Boggs's "primitive-modernist music". In his book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, Marcus writes "Dock Boggs made a primitive-modernist music (...). Primitive because the music was put together out of junk you could find in anyone’s yard (...); modernist because the music was about choices you made in a world a disinterested god had plainly left to its own devices, a world where only art or revolution, the symbolic remaking of the world, could take you out of yourself". 2
Karl Haendel's works illustrate how chains of signification work. There are many possible chains or associations in this exhibition. He leaves it up to the viewer to make his or her own.
Karl Haendel (b.1976, New York) lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at international venues including the Lever House, New York (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2006).
He has also been featured in numerous group: Haunted, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2010) Beg Borrow and Steal, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida (2009), Nothingness and Being, curated by Shamim Momin, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico (2009), This Is Killing Me, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2009), Meet Me Around the Corner – Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2008) and Uncertain States Of America, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum and Gunnar B. Kvaran, Astrup Fearnley Museet Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2005), traveling to the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-onHudson, New York and the Serpentine Gallery, London (catalogue).
1 MOCA Focus: Karl Haendel, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2006.
2 Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York, H. Holt & Co., 1997, p. 153-154.
9 June - 2 July 2011
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Karl Haendel’s first solo exhibition in France. It will feature new drawings and works on paper and two installations.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, June 9 from 6-8pm and will be on view until July 2, 2011.
Karl Haendel’s large-scale graphite works are drawings of appropriated images or the artist’s own drawings, words or photographs. He projects them onto large Arche paper and draws their contours, shading and gradations.
On this technique he noted “using projector is a way to change the scale and understand the effect of differently scaled images on the static scale of the human body. The idea of scale suggests that there is a standard size of a certain thing and it’s noticeable when you deviate from it.” 1
Haendel’s drawings can be figurative or abstract and come from various sources: text-based or photorealistic images, scribbles, comics, newspapers or political commentaries.
Haendel arranges these intentionally diverse images in temporary groupings that only exist for his exhibitions.
Works are grouped for their formal links (comparing and contrasting sense of gravity and weight, interior and exterior, light and shadow) or conceptual links, often relating to his personal experience, in order to shift their meaning and symbolic possibilities.
The two installations Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one, You got a way of tearin' the world apart, love, see what you've done. (Sugarbaby #1) and You can’t turn back—you can’t come back, sometimes we push too far. One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are. (Sugarbaby #4) are titled after the lyrics of the song Sugar Baby, recorded in 1927 by Dock Boggs and later sang by Bob Dylan who was greatly influence by Boggs.
These complex structures of intersected graphite and acrylic drawings mounted on boards with 16mm film projections seem to illustrate Greil Marcus's words on Boggs's "primitive-modernist music". In his book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, Marcus writes "Dock Boggs made a primitive-modernist music (...). Primitive because the music was put together out of junk you could find in anyone’s yard (...); modernist because the music was about choices you made in a world a disinterested god had plainly left to its own devices, a world where only art or revolution, the symbolic remaking of the world, could take you out of yourself". 2
Karl Haendel's works illustrate how chains of signification work. There are many possible chains or associations in this exhibition. He leaves it up to the viewer to make his or her own.
Karl Haendel (b.1976, New York) lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at international venues including the Lever House, New York (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2006).
He has also been featured in numerous group: Haunted, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2010) Beg Borrow and Steal, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida (2009), Nothingness and Being, curated by Shamim Momin, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico (2009), This Is Killing Me, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2009), Meet Me Around the Corner – Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2008) and Uncertain States Of America, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum and Gunnar B. Kvaran, Astrup Fearnley Museet Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2005), traveling to the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-onHudson, New York and the Serpentine Gallery, London (catalogue).
1 MOCA Focus: Karl Haendel, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2006.
2 Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York, H. Holt & Co., 1997, p. 153-154.