Image:
Karl Haendel
Courtesy
of Yvon Lambert, Paris
KARL HAENDEL
9 June -
2 July, 2011
Opening Friday, June 9, from 6-8
pm
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.
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-on-
Hudson, 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.
