Studio Visit with Karl Haendel: Drawing, Masculinity, and the Materiality of Images

Written By Clarisse Abelarde

It’s a cold Tuesday afternoon at 3 PM when I step into Karl Haendel’s Los Angeles studio, a space that feels at once archival and alive, methodical yet filled with unpredictable moments. Haendel’s practice is deeply rooted in drawing, a medium he uses as a tool of conceptual inquiry to interrogate contemporary issues. It’s a medium he pushes beyond traditional boundaries, using scale and material honesty to argue for drawing to be taken as seriously as installation, video, or painting.

From the outset, he offers a glimpse into his meticulous process. “Almost all my drawings start as 35mm slides,” he tells me, flipping through neatly categorized boxes of transparencies. “Well, actually, they start as digital images, then become slides, then become drawings.” There’s a structure to his system—each slide is organized alphabetically, grouped by subject matter: dogs, democratic bumper stickers, scribbles, and even SUVs. This precise indexing is a crucial part of his practice, a way of breaking down and categorizing the visual into a language. It’s a (perhaps futile?) effort to make meaning, to make sense. 

The Archive as a Practice 

Haendel’s studio isn’t just a workspace; it’s an extensive visual repository. Exhibition models, posters, invites, printed catalogs, and past works fill the room. “We used to print things for shows,” he says, “it was nice to be able to hold something, certainly better than looking at a screen.” He acknowledges the shift toward digital, yet there’s an evident appreciation for physicality—holding onto a tangible record of artistic production.

One drawing, he notes, was lost in a recent fire. “I might end up making a new version of that drawing; it just depends on if the insurance comes through,” he says with a mix of resignation and pragmatism. The ephemerality of artworks, particularly in a medium as fragile as paper, is something he has to confront.

Drawing the Male Body: A Conceptual Approach

A central theme in Haendel’s work is questioning traditional masculinity and offering examples of new masculinities. The twenty drawings of men’s butts facing me on a large wall I thought (and hoped) were part of this project. “There aren’t many straight male artists talking about men’s bodies as objects of desire or as beautiful,” he remarks. “If straights talked about it, they would be considered “gay” or “effeminate,” two things traditional masculinity is terrified of. So if you found it in modern art history, gay men made it, say in Mapplethorpe or Thomas Eakins.” His project, then, is an evolution in the representation of men’s bodies and offers an example of masculinity that is not in fear of the effeminate.

The series, called Great Ass at the Met, are drawings from iPhone pics Haendel took of the rear ends of male statues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. They juxtapose classical representations of the male form with contemporary notions of bodily perfection—think social media fitness influencers, workout culture, and the obsession with sculpted physiques. “I wanted to take antiquity and get it real close to contemporary physical aesthetics—think a marble Greek Adonis doing squats or hanging with the Kardashians, or better yet, the statue is taking butt pics!” he gleefully explains. 

Haendel was laying out the design of a new book to be released in May, dedicated to the great asses. Art historian Andy Campbell is contributing an essay to the volume that draws connections between these visual cultures two millennia apart. Unexpectedly, Haendel also enlisted an Instagram fitness influencer—NUNZI, aka “DABOOTEEKING,” as a book contributor, authoring a workout guide to better glutes, a first for any art book as far as I can recall. “I befriended him on Instagram,” Haendel says with a grin. “He’s got over a million followers. He posts these ridiculous videos wearing pink spandex and shaking his fantastic ass, but he knows what he’s doing in terms of gender norms. It’s totally self-aware.” The humor in this project is unmistakable, but it also speaks to the shifting nature of bodily representation and aspiration in the digital age.

Collaboration, Family, and the Joy of Drawing

Throughout the visit, it becomes clear that Haendel’s work is not just about image-making; it’s about relationships with other artists, his community, and his family. His daughter, an 11-year-old with an unfiltered, fearless approach to drawing, has become an unexpected collaborator in his work. Often, these works take the form of historically resonant imagery drawn by Haendel, with his daughter’s Sharpie drawings overlaid on top, creating a tension between childlike spontaneity and the weight of history. “She started drawing on my work during COVID when she was in the studio more often,” he says. “I just loved the joyfulness of her line and the contrast between her innocence and the heavy subjects I was working with. We are working on one now about the state of American civil discourse. First, I made a large drawing of the Capital, and then I showed her images of various protests that took place in front of it, pro-choice and pro-life, January 6, disability rights, civil rights, all of it, from the left and the right,” he explains. Observing the images, his daughter distilled them to their most essential truth: “People just scream at each other.”

Alongside these playful collaborations, Haendel’s studio also holds a striking series of hyperrealistic drawings—large-scale renderings of artists’ dominant hands, doubled and impossibly intertwined. The hands, all from Haendel’s Los Angeles artist community, are drawn with stunning precision, reflecting gestures of connection, tension, and entanglement. “They’re like portraits, but without faces,” he says, “you can learn so much about a person by looking at their hands.” These works magnified to an almost overwhelming scale, turn something as intimate as a hand’s grip into a monumental statement about relationships, labor, and artistic exchange.

A Practice in Constant Evolution

As we wrap up our conversation, I ask Haendel about his favorite work in the studio. He gestures toward a text piece featuring a small, wide-eyed puppy. Above the dog’s head is a speech bubble with German text that translates to: “I didn’t ask to be born, and I don’t want to die.” “Some people think it’s about puppy mills, which I never even thought of,” he says, “but it’s about us, the basic human condition. None of us asked to be here, and most of us don’t want to leave.”

That existential undertone runs through much of Haendel’s work. His practice is an ongoing engagement with history, representation, and the act of looking. Whether through precise graphite renderings, conceptual humor, or collaborations with his daughter, Haendel’s work continues to evolve—challenging assumptions about what drawing can be and the narratives it can hold.

Clarisse Abelarde
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