Lunch on Fridays: Karl Haendel

Spend a lunch hour learning about the latest in art and design during these Friday lectures. Each lecture features a variety of artists and designers from around the world, including CIA faculty and visiting artists.

Karl Haendel was born in New York in 1976. He received a BA in Art History and Art Semiotics from Brown University in 1998. He participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York in 1999 and in 2000 briefly studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He then received his MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2003.

Haendel's meticulously hand-rendered, photorealistic graphite drawings reproduce images pulled from the world of mass media and everyday objects, calling into question art world conceptions of originality, production, and reproduction. Haendel arranges his drawings in salon-style installations to foster powerful juxtapositions of references, often specifically quoting American culture. He directly infers mechanical reproduction in his drawings of newspaper clippings. He juxtaposes drawings of a family snapshot, a political bumper sticker, a New Yorker cartoon, an Internet image of a child wearing a dunce hat, a list of questions for the artist's father, and other images. In the installation How to Have a Socially Responsible Orgasm and Other Life Lessons (2009), Haendel suggestively invoked the WWII-era rationing of consumerist goods through images such as a snarling dog, a rocket, a diamond, Kosher salt, clothespins, a train, repeated slogans, and Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

Haendel's visit at CIA is in conjunction with MOCA Cleveland's exhibition that opens November 1, I Work From Home. Bio courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided. Click here to read more about the Lunch on Fridays series.