Donald Baechler, was a prominent figure in the East Village art scene of 1980s New York, is renowned for his painting-collage-drawing works that feature childhood imagery and nostalgic ephemera such as grammar school primers, old maps, and children’s drawings, as well as deliberately cliché motifs like skulls, roses, globes, and soccer balls. Despite the seemingly faux-naïf imagery, Baechler was committed to conveying what he termed the “illusion of history” in his paintings. In an interview with Kapp for Bomb, he explained, “If you drag the brush across the canvas, you know more or less what’s going to happen. But my surface enforces the process of mistakes and erasure and change—it almost insists on change.”

Baechler’s work has been collected by numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

More Information
Artist Website
New York Times