Donald Baechler
Hartford, CT, United States
1 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
New York City
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Works by Donald Baechler
The American artist Donald Baechler, 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 (American, b.1956) is a celebrated and internationally recognized Contemporary artist. His work is usually rendered in a style that combines both innocence and sophistication. He was born in Hartford, CT, and received his formal education in Art at the College of Art, Maryland Institute in Baltimore, MD, from 1974 to 1977, and later at Cooper Union, New York, NY. In 1978, he enrolled in a two-year course at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Then He came back to the United States when the Neo-Expressionist movement was gaining popularity among American artists. He became a major luminary of this movement along with other Neo-Expressionist artists such as Basquiat.
Some of Baechler’s recent solo exhibitions include the Donald Baechler: Painting and Sculpture display in 2012 at Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, NY, the Sculptures and Paintings exhibition at the McClain Gallery in Houston, TX, in 2011, and the Recent Works exhibition at the Studio d’Arte Raffaelli in Trento, Italy. His works can also be viewed at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York.
Public Collections:
Centre George Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.