Karl Haendel: Less Bad

Saturday, May 17 – Sunday, July 27, 2025

Less Bad is Karl Haendel’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly two decades. The exhibition features recent large-scale drawings that examine masculinity, intimacy, friendship, fatherhood, and loss. With a blend of technical precision and dry, self-aware humor, Haendel invites viewers to slow down and reflect on the contradictions of contemporary life.

Working primarily in graphite on paper, Haendel embraces analogue mark-making as both method and metaphor. His text-based drawings pair confessional, first-person reflections with the labor of drawing, surfacing relatable experiences of love, insecurity, grief, and Jewish identity. These works, alongside a selection of intimate figurative drawings, explore vulnerability and emotional honesty as essential counterpoints to stereotypical expectations of masculinity.

 

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Karl Haendel (b. 1976, New York; lives and works in Los Angeles) is known for his meticulous, often monumentally scaled pencil drawings that translate photographic and textual sources into hand-drawn images. His work explores the politics of representation, authorship, and identity, frequently grappling with personal and social themes through a conceptual lens. Haendel’s work has been included in the Whitney Biennial (2014) and in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; ICA Boston; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, among many others.

Organized in collaboration with the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, Karl Haendel: Less Bad is co-curated by Aldy Milliken and Andrea Gyorody, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication anticipated in Fall 2025. This exhibition is supported by a generous grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance.

 

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Organized in collaboration with the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, Karl Haendel: Less Bad is co-curated by Aldy Milliken and Andrea Gyorody, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication anticipated in fall 2025. This exhibition is supported by a generous grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance. 

Image: Karl Haendel, As of Yet Not Titled 5 (detail), 2024, pencil and ink on paper, 74 x 51 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles.