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.

The American artist Donald Baechler is renowned for his figurative work prominently in the Neo-Expressionist and Pop Art movements during the 1980s. His bold and clean iconographic depictions of universal subjects; such as flowers, birds, and ice cream cones, create a feeling of memory without becoming an illustration or cartoon.

Baechler´s complex work is renowned for its flatness and simple execution, reminiscent of Andy Warhol´s Pop and clean lines, Jasper Jones´s bold colours, Robert Rauschenberg´s collaging and Jean Dubuffet´s simplicity.

With the Rose series, Bechler explores the subject of femininity, sexuality, and love through the depiction of a singular rose, centered in the silkscreen edition. Painted in a cartoon-style, this voluptuous and thorn-less rose was originally based on a photograph of a rose tattoo, that the artist photographed prior. Looking at this Yellow Rose silkscreen, one can only think of Gertrude Stein´s quote “a rose is a rose is a rose”, the beauty, simplicity, and pop-ness.

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“ I love gluing things together. It is a deeply satisfying process, and it is a very different impulse than just making a drawing. It becomes a kind of sculptural thing. „

—Donald Baechler