Karl Haendel, “Hazel’s Room”

A large drawing—large by most standards, but not by comparison with others hanging nearby—titled “Hazel’s Room” places an ancient symbol of menace, a wolf, at large in an up-to-date child’s bedroom. It’s every bit the nightmare image it appears: Hazel is the artist’s daughter, still an infant when her father dreamed she was missing and he found a wild animal in her place. The fear he felt while sleeping was later replaced by the recognition of universal parental vulnerability. Such insights are primary in his art.

Karl Haendel is an artist based in Los Angeles. He made his name in the avant-garde technique of appropriation, in which the artist deliberately copies not just the subject or style of a previous artist, but entire specific works. Depending on whom you asked, appropriation was the next, essential and appropriate step in shocking the audience, which had been an accidental byproduct of Modernism’s need to dismantle the limitations that history had gradually imposed on the artist’s freedom, only to become an end in itself. Or it was a mature step in that process, by which it was shown that what made Rembrandt Rembrandt, for example, was not some unprecedented skill that was never to be seen again, but the Dutch painter’s fortuitous location and his moment in history. In any event, two or three decades later, appropriation, like every shock that preceded it, has settled into its historical place and become just another choice an artist can make.

That said, what largely made a Haendel artwork feel original was just that: its size. An extreme example might measure 100 square feet, all of it meticulously hand drawn by a prodigious draftsman. Several such works are on display among the 60 graphite works at The Kimball. Its director, Aldy Milliken, has known and collaborated with Karl Haendel for 20 years, during which time he has witnessed Haendel’s growth as a very human artist, the result of which Milliken is now in a position to share with Utah’s arts audience. The exhibition these two long-time associates have organized, with the cooperation of Dr. Andrea Gyorody, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University, will travel there after it completes its run at The Kimball.

Opening night of Karl Haendel’s “Less Bad” with Kimball Art Center patrons in front of “Self Portrait as a Knight.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

Installation view of “Less Bad.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

In a conventional American narrative, the unease created by “Hazel’s Room” might be corrected by an unearned scene of courage and skill: the father saves the child by main force. What Haendel offers is “Self Portrait as a Knight,” a life-sized image of a man, presumably him, wearing a suit of armor, his competence undermined by the bottom half of the hero’s attire having gone missing, revealing boxer-briefs and sagging dress socks. Furthermore, the gallery in which he hangs has been divided by several waist-high partitions that recall the way banks, airlines and other exemplars of modern life attempt every day to make sheep of us.

A somewhat more oblique critique of a related quality, masculinity, is seen in a stack of lawn mowers that refers to one of many culturally-assigned divisions of labor. The same context can contain contrasting lessons, as two sports drawings reveal: in one, American football stresses helmets, body armor, and brutal contact, which contrast with the ecstatic embrace of two international players.

Haendel has mastered more than just scale with his pencil. Several large blocks of text feature meticulously hand-drawn typefaces, his labor lending gravity to their contents. A bravura stunt by various cartoonists, who sometimes undertake to mimic each other’s styles, gives rise to “Tony Lewis 1-5” (version 2). Here Haendel responds to a fellow artist’s request for a written appreciation of his art with five pages of comics, in which the most familiar figures from the genre—Krazy Kat, Snoopy, Calvin, Hobbes, ad infinitum—discuss Tony’s work by means of questions of black (the line) and white (the page, but also the dominant race), representation and erasure, and the capacity of drawing to simultaneously address multiple matters. At the show’s opening, a line formed as captivated viewers, unwilling to miss even a single frame, worked their way through all 53 panels.

It should be apparent that many, though by no means all, of the works and the texts here effectively speak in the first person. They’re self-referential, which might explain why these specific examples were on hand for use in a retrospective exhibition: one meant to introduce him to a new audience. But to make that argument would be disingenuous. The truth is that Haendel’s subject matter, the things he cares about, consist in large part of things we, too, care about in 2024: parenting, love, loss, friendship, introspection, race, and gender among them. The gallery’s introductory statement says:

The title Less Bad refers to the artist’s use of self-deprecating humor as a versatile comedic approach that involves poking fun at oneself instead of others, all the while delivering a message about trying to be a better human.

That’s well said, but one might add that Karl Haendel recognizes that the society of which he partakes is flawed and in need of repair. He must know he’s not alone in seeing that, nor is he alone in wanting to do better in order to be better.

Installation view of “Less Bad.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

Less Bad, Kimball Art Center, Park City, through Dec. 1

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.