EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE
HALSEY MCKAY is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Karl Haendel and Adam Helms. Both artists create distinctly personal oeuvres through highly skilled implementation of pre-existing imagery. Here, they thematically hone in on “water” as source material culled from pop culture, news media, the internet, song and literature. Rendered in graphite on paper, and laser etched into dyed paper on panel, the subjects span the personal, iconic and irreverent. A child’s water bottle, comic book heroes, a paraplegic hockey player, a group of walrus, a coast guard ship on the sea, figures from Das Boot, Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, The Wrath of God–all play roles in the simulacra. Inflected with pathos, humor and nostalgia this cast lends clue to the artists’ search for material, meaning and what may be implied in the gaps between.
Karl Haendel earned his BA from Brown University in 1998 and his MFA from UCLA in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Yvon Lambert, Paris, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, Museo de Arte de El Salvador, S. Salvador, SV, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT, Human Resources, Los Angeles, Lever House, NY, and a “MOCA Focus Series” solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has been included in the California Biennial (2004, 2008), Prospect (2011), Biennial de Lyon (2013) and the Whitney Biennial (2014). His works are in the collections of MOCA, Los Angeles, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOMA, NY, The Guggenheim Museum, NY, The Whitney Museum, NY, the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway, and La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico.
Adam Helms lives and works in New York. He was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Grant Award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY and Grimm Gallery, Netherlands. His work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Helms’s work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and the Dakis Joannou Collection among others.