The American artist, who became part of the flourishing Lower Manhattan arts scene in the 1980s, showing in the East Village and exhibition spaces such as Artists Space and the Drawing Center. Baechler rose to prominence with his depictions of everyday objects and naive simple figures that appeal to the sentimental longing for childhood.

As a student at Cooper Union, in the late 1970s, Baechler found himself surrounded by the works of Pop artists and Neo-Expressionists, who played a big role in influencing his style. He got acquainted with Tony Shafrazi, who was focusing on graffiti-oriented works, and founded a downtown gallery that represented Baechler, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and eventually Jean-Michel Basquiat.
His use of various mediums in his paintings by combining drawings and collage. His imagery includes nostalgic banal objects that draw associations with childhood; grammar school primers, old maps, and children’s drawings, a skull, a rose, a globe, and a soccer ball. Despite the associations with the graffiti art movement, however, the artist emphasizes that his art is rooted in abstraction.

Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler, a member of the East Village art scene in 1980s New York, is known for his painting-collage-drawing works depicting of childhood imagery and nostalgic ephemera like grammar school primers, old maps, and children’s drawings, or purposely cliché motifs such as a skull, a rose, a globe, and a soccer ball.

A renowned figurative artist who emerged from the East Village art scene in the 1980s in New York, Donald Baechler´s works depict simple everyday objects that allude to the cultural symbolism of nostalgia and cliché. Reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet, Baechler´s works are filled with an approach of sincerity and innocence throughout his subject matter.

The voluptuous rose is a prominent motif in Baechler's work vocabulary. A subject that is recognized by the masses, Baechler places his subject in isolation which becomes an iconic emblem for love, passion, sexuality, and mortality. The origin of this rose, however, does not come from nature. But, from the artist´s personal photographic archive of rose tattoos, which he has been photographing for years. Looking at Baechler´s thornless Rose series, one may be reminded of Gertrude Stein´s quote “a rose is a rose is a rose” its beauty, simplicity, and pop-ness.

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“ I am interested in a sort of suspension of meaning in the pictures. „

—Donald Baechler