Donald Baechler came of age as a painter in the early 1980s, when he began exhibiting internationally, and critics have stated that his work "places him in the painterly tribe of Twombly, Ryman, Rauschenberg and Schwitters."
Baechler worked from a great inventory of worldly images. Recorded on slides and collected in the archives of his enormous Lower Manhattan studio, they are the sources for many of the compelling images in his paintings and graphic work. The cast of characters - which also includes himself - come from every source imaginable, and are stamped, silk-screened, projected, drawn, painted, printed, or collaged onto surfaces. Then the process begins: underpainting, overpainting, canceling, adding, subtracting, and editing until the final work emerges. Baechler has also worked extensively in the graphic medium.
An important member of the neo-expressionist movement, Baechler is also acknowledged as a second-generation pop artist. In the vein of contemporaries such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf, Baechler incorporated childlike imagery in his paintings, also taking note of styles established by Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet. His seemingly ordinary subjects-such as flowers, houses, and household items-are transformed to symbolize universal themes like community, identity, sexuality, and mortality. Through the combination of collected media images and his own drawings and paintings, Baechler expressed an interest in pop culture, giving the illusion of nostalgia among viewers.
His artistic process combined drawings, paintings, collage, printmakin,g and graphic art. His creative process began amidst a vast collection of popular images and objects, and inspired by classical art history, the New York School, contemporary art, folk art, outsider art, pop culture, and childhood memories. As a result, his paintings are condensed versions of a cumulative process, built in fragments and layers to create what he calls an "illusion of history."
Baechler's work can be seen in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Centre George Pompidou, Paris, and Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, among other notable institutions worldwide.