Donald Baechler was born in Hartford (USA) in 1956.
An internationally renowned contemporary artist, his work has a style that combines innocence with refinement. In his paintings he makes use of various mediums, mixing paint, drawings and collages, and inserting nostalgic objects that refer to childhood. His vividly colored and thickly outlined close-up images – flowers, faces, skulls, animals, vehicles and ice cream cones – remain the key to his stylistic research.
As a student at Cooper Union in the late 70s, Baechler was surrounded by the works of pop and neo-expressionist artists. He met Tony Shafrazi, who was focusing on graffiti-oriented work, and started a gallery downtown that represented Baechler, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the 80s with Basquiat he was one of the most important representatives of "Neo-Expressionism" and he largely contributed to the success of the movement by inserting Pop images, commercial icons and symbols into his work.
In 1987 he was invited to participate in the São Paulo Biennial and in 1988 he participated in MoMA PS1. Among the most recent exhibitions are Donald Baechler: Painting and Sculpture of 2012 at the Fischer Landau Center of Art, Long Island, New York; in 2011 Sculptures and Paintings at the McClain Gallery in Houston, Texas, and the exhibition Recent Works at the Raffaelli Art Gallery in Trento. His works appear in more than fifty international museums including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Center George Pompidou Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janiero in Rio de Janeiro, the MART of Trento, the GAM of Bologna.
Baechler died suddenly in April 2022.
