Artist Donald Baechler has died.
Baechler exhibited with contemporaries Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean Michel Basquiat in NYC in the 80s. The bio on his website reads that his,
… paintings are condensed versions of that cumulative process, built in fragments and layers to create what he calls an
illusion of history.”
Baechler attended the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1974 to 1977, studying for his B.F.A. in Painting, and Cooper Union from 1977 to 1978 for his M.F.A.
At Cooper Union I met some German exchange students. This was 1977, and I found the whole scene at the school to be white and boring, to be honest…”
Baechler returned to New York City in 1980 and Tony Shafrazi struck up an acquaintance over a shared interest in artist Joseph Kosuth. Shafrazi was developing an interest in graffiti-oriented works, and founded a downtown gallery that represented Baechler, Scharf, Haring and eventually Basquiat.
In a 2000 interview, Baechler said:
Tony obviously had some grander vision about what was going on and decided that it wasn’t the end of conceptualism, but the beginning of something else. I never felt entirely comfortable showing my work there because it had nothing to do with what Keith and Kenny Scharf were doing.
I always used to tell people, ‘I’m an abstract artist before anything else,’ For me, it’s always been more about line, form, balance and the edge of the canvas—all these silly formalist concerns—than it has been about subject matter or narrative or politics.
Steven Vincent wrote in Art in America,
Donald Baechler’s seemingly ingenuous depictions of everyday objects and simple figures succeed in large part by tapping into our nostalgia for childhood
…that period of life before the rivening onset of self-consciousness and guilt. It’s a myth, of course: children are hardly angelic, and alienation is the state of humanity—while Beachler’s art works hard to achieve its trademark appearance of prelapsarian sincerity and artlessness.”
Baechler went on to show with Cheim & Read gallery in NYC and exhibited his work around the world. Baechler is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Centre George Pompidou, Paris among other institutions worldwide.
I knew Donald a bit, years ago. He was very modest, shy, kind and intelligent and honestly, I’ve never heard a bad word said about him in 40 years. I have a beautiful flower print of his from the mid-90s (above) that is due to arrive next week at my house in Mexico. It will be the first piece I hang with a lovely bunch of flowers in front of it, for Donald.
Baechler posted a flower painting on social media almost every day. Below was his last, posted yesterday.
No cause of death is known at this writing. (I have heard through friends that it was a heart attack at a charity event, but that has not been officially confirmed.)
