Los Angeles-based artist Karl Haendel who makes drawings, installations, films and public projects has an exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash New York, Chelsea gallery through December 05, 20015. The multilayered exhibition features large, labor-intensive pencil drawings situated within an immersive monochromatic installation.
For his exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, titled “Organic Bedfellow, Feral Othello”, Haendel sets up an immersive black and white environment of juxtaposing narratives, tracing our animalistic nature to evolve and transform against tendencies towards devolution.
Haendel, whose practice includes drawing, installation, and film, is best known for his photorealistic graphic drawings depicting imagery pulled from everyday life and media. His work often contrasts these familiar consumerist motifs with conceptual syntaxes or frameworks, which highlight artistic concerns of production and reproduction. Haendel describes his own practice as “honest work about contradiction and hypocrisy." His work engages the role of drawing as performance and record, executed with a coherence of narrative and subject as a journey.
What could be a better foil in understanding human evolution than everyday moments of devolution, which have remained a part of our species for thousands of years: getting cold, quenching thirst, being out of breath. Black and white may be defined in opposition to each other, but this is also what makes them inextricably linked. Our evolution is our devolution. Our devolution is our evolution. When we recycle, somewhere deep down inside we acknowledge the hypothetical end of Earth for our species, and when we couple, somewhere deep down inside we resist it.
-- Karl Haendel
About Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Founded by Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash, who previously headed the worldwide Contemporary and Impressionist & Modern Art divisions of Sotheby’s, Mitchell-Innes & Nash places exemplary contemporary artists within a historical context, revealing a continuity of ideas and aesthetic virtuosity from the Modern era through the present day.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is located at 534 West 26th Street in Chelsea and 1018 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side.
SOURCE: http://www.miandn.com/
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