Karl Haendel’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly two decades, Less Bad features recent large-scale drawings that examine masculinity, intimacy, friendship, fatherhood, and loss.
With a blend of technical precision and dry, self-aware humor, Haendel invites viewers to slow down and reflect on the contradictions of contemporary life.
Working primarily in graphite on paper, Haendel embraces analogue mark-making as both method and metaphor. His text-based drawings pair confessional, first-person reflections with the labor of drawing, surfacing relatable experiences of love, insecurity, grief, and Jewish identity. These works, alongside a selection of intimate figurative drawings, explore vulnerability and emotional honesty as essential counterpoints to stereotypical expectations of masculinity.
