Karl Haendel is an artist who makes drawings, installations, and billboards. As Haendel describes his own practice, he "tries to make honest work about contradiction and hypocrisy." He bases his drawings on found and self-made photographs, constructing a liminal reality with the artist’s very personal reference points. His work engages the role of drawing as performance and record, executed with a coherence of narrative and subject as journey. Haendel thematically investigates time, romantic exploration, and failure.

Haendel earned his BA from Brown University in 1998 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. He studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2006 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Projects, Los Angeles; Harris Lieberman, New York; and Yvon Lambert, Paris. His work has been featured in “Beg Borrow and Steal” at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; "Nothingness and Being" at the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico; “Hammer Contemporary Collection Part 1,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and “Uncertain States Of America,” Astrup Fearnley Museet Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. He lives in Los Angeles.