this is Karl c. 1959 getting a handle on things.
this is Karl c. 1980 as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. handle? what handle?
this is Karl c. 2019 hoping his dog Tex Critter will help him get a handle on things.
represented by Transmission Gallery, Oakland, CA and Jen Tough Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Monsters + Friends is a collection of the recent work of sculptor Karl X. Hauser, all made since his solo show two years ago, Failed Repression: I Tried to Make This Pleasant. The funny and strange denizens of his carnivalesque imagination — sculptures in cast aluminum, cast bronze, kiln-formed glass, and drawings in graphite, watercolor and crayon — fill the gallery, making for a total environment of cheerfully absurd grotesquerie. “Drawing lets me have fluid thoughts, internal dialogues, and teaches me fearlessness,” he said. “The drawings inject characters and sets into my sculpture, which also incorporates castings of found materials, cut up and reassembled.” Hauser’s makeshift brainchildren, pieced-together scraps brought to life — e.g., The Wild Ride, The Wrestler, Charming Personages, and The Academy in Peril — may evoke cartoons and the bizarre “personages” of Jean Dubuffet, as well as a certain Karloffian creature assembled from available materials. Artist talk and closing reception, January 25. 2-4 p.m.
— DeWitt Cheng
Karl X. Hauser has a reality all his own, one both terrifyingly whimsical and endearingly relatable. Piece by piece, his reality juxtaposes with ours, easily at first: hasn’t everyone felt like a Balloon Man from time to time? Isn’t every day a Wild Ride? Then the details register: wheels mismatched, mangled; limbs amorphous, akimbo; bodies devoid of symmetry. There’s a cheerful nihilism to Karl’s work, a joy that flows as each piece forces us to think about the incongruous, about the bounds of normality, rationality, and reason. Karl himself is unbounded, working in any medium that suits his vision—his work both strikingly visual and powerfully kinetic. Ultimately, and perhaps ironically, we’re left to wonder how Karl’s lonely horde somehow brings us such contentment.
— Andrew McAleavey
About
Karl x Hauser was born in Michigan City, on a small farm in northwest Indiana. He played in the dirt, drew pictures, and learned to swim in Lake Michigan. His mother, a self taught artist who invented and painted “blue roses”, encouraged him to draw as it didn’t have the messy potential of paint.
Later, he worked for the railroad as a gandy dancer (track laborer) in order to save money for art school. He attended the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis where he studied sculpture, learned to make neon signs, and was first exposed to video art. He received his MFA in video and performance art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981.
His work has included drawing, watercolor, digital collage, and sculpture. His sculptures involve a wide range of materials including styrofoam, cardboard, wire, ceramic, found objects, etc., either used directly or as patterns for molds.
Siimultaneously figurative and expressionistic, his work weaves together humor and the horrific.