Sorcha Dallas

Karl Haendel Author: Kristina Kite ANNA HELWING GALLERY 2766 S. La Cienega Boulevard March 05–April 09 Karl Haendel’s current exhibition, titled “Grits Ain’t Groceries (all around the world),” is a dense but tidy show, sharply conceived and seriously good. Thick with conceptual connections, mirrored images and reversals, skillful appropriations and big scribbles, Haendel’s drawings explore the ties between, for example, a slanted section of 40 Wall Street (aka the Trump Building), a pair of Robert Longo dancers each missing a leg, a Mono-ha window installation, and two “falling” exclamation points. Haendel loosely groups his precise pencil renderings of New Yorker cartoons, family pictures, the Harper’s Index, and other recognizable imagery with twisting and tipsy punctuation marks, turning these montages into personal inquiries. Images¬ósuch as air conditioning units (each dedicated to an elected or would-be Democratic Senator), roughly drawn “depressed” nudes, and obsessive accumulations of words like “try” and “believe”¬ó recur, stretching the relationships from one end of the gallery to the other. Haunting the installation are Haendel’s “ghosts,” photographs of drawings (of photographs?) printed in negative¬ófrom a white-faced Bob Dylan to a no-faced Chardin. Where connections begin and end is up to the viewer, but every loose end asks to be tied and Haendel provides us with plenty to consider. Karl Haendel, Installation view, 2005