5th Column Group, 2007. Multipart installation, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council  2007.140. © Karl Haendel

Based on a diverse range of images and texts sourced directly from the mass media, art history, and autobiographical material, Karl Haendel's rigorously conceptual work interrogates modes of representation and information dispersal within contemporary culture, while simultaneously inviting the pleasures of technical virtuosity. His crisp monochrome images appear at first glance to be photographic or mechanical reproductions, but are in fact meticulously detailed pencil drawings. In a mimetic process that returns the artist's hand to the re-photography gesture pioneered by “Pictures Generation” artists such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, Haendel photographs his pilfered images, projects them, and meticulously redraws them—a painstaking method that negates the traditional associations of drawing as gestural and originary. The artist frequently configures the individual images into salon-style installations, grouped according to instinctive formal and thematic relationships. The eight-part work 5th Column Group (2007), brings together drawings of a family snapshot, a political bumper sticker, a New Yorker cartoon, an Internet image of a child wearing a dunce hat, an abstract scribble, a list of questions for the artist's father, and two posters of repeated slogans, confronting the viewer with both a deeply personal compilation and a more universal anthology of our collective cultural identity.

Katherine Brinson