Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler (1956-2022, USA) is one of our time's most intriguing artists. Like many of his contemporaries, such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he combined painting and collage, incorporating existing images into his art. Baechler utilized a deliberately childish visual language in his paintings and sculptures. His gallerist Cheim & Read has described Baechler's art as follows: "His repertoire of motifs spans various genres, but they begin as drawings and end up as sculptures, where the motifs finally achieve their definitive three-dimensional volume."

In an interview accompanying the exhibition "Sculptures" from 2005 at the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, Baechler explains: "About fifteen, twenty years ago, I was deeply saddened by how I was drawing, so I decided to learn how to draw again as a project, starting from the very simplest movement, in order to reinvent a language of lines and forms. I began looking at children's art, outsider art, and the whole Dubuffet thing. So when I started making sculptures about ten years ago, I tried to find a way to create forms as if I had never worked with sculpture before. I wanted to try to forget everything I knew about armature and the right way to use clay, the right ways to do everything. Instead, I started using my own hands and squeezing the material to create forms... There is no narrative intention; it is just a reaction to the materials. They look the way they do because that's how they look. I even think there is less content in the sculptures than there is in the paintings. Less storytelling. They are like mute... It is these discreet and completely silent objects that interest me. I have never been particularly interested in the narratives or the psychology, or all that stuff, that many read into my paintings and probably also into the sculptures."