American
b. November 22, 1956, Hartford, Connecticut
Lives and works in New York, New York

Donald Baechler is an American artist and a key figure in the Neo-Expressionist movement. Living in New York since the 1970s, he worked alongside figures such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, incorporating child-like imagery, Pop Art, and the iconography of commerce into his colorful paintings, prints and works on paper.

Although he says he is an abstract artist before anything else, Baechler’s recognizable images have elements about them that are absurd. Fellow painter David Kapp observes that You see something that’s incredibly beautiful with this strong quality of line, and then it’s depicting what seems to be almost ridiculous subject matter. It hits a nerve. But still for Donald Baechler 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. Images and titles selected from the artist’s comprehensive reference archive are somewhat more random than one might think. 

Baechler grew up in a Quaker family who nourished his early artistic talent. He went on to study at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore from 1974–1977, and continued his education at New York’s Cooper Union. There he befriended Tony Shifrazi, who in 1979 founded a downtown gallery that reflected his interest in work inspired by graffiti art. With an international exhibition record, Donald Baechler is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Centre George Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, as well as other institutions worldwide.