Widely exhibited and collected, Donald Baechler’s art has been turning heads for more than 30 years. Often considered childlike, his paintings, sculptures and works on paper reflect a willful intent to unlearn everything he was taught in art school. Working intuitively, Baechler embraces an Art Brut philosophy mixed with a modern-day fascination for Twombly’s painterly surfaces, Rauschenberg’s collaged fields and Warhol’s machinelike repetition. His current survey show, which consists mainly of large-scale canvases, big bronzes and monochromatic prints from Emily Fisher Landau’s collection and Baechler’s own holdings, provides an offbeat overview of the artist’s poetic body of work—from early Expressionist paintings of figures floating on coarse planes to recent flat sculptures of fanciful flowers and potted plants.
Priceless, Wordless, Loveless, from 1987–88, and Deep North, from 1989, were both included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, and respectively portray a gangly girl dwarfing a pine tree and a balding man watching the sun rise over a forest—each crudely caught on pentimento grounds. Complicating the picture plane, 2002’s Rationalism Versus Empiricism (Globe) places an oddly painted planet Earth over a canvas collaged with found textiles and renderings of flowers, lightbulbs and children with gaping mouths. Meanwhile Autonomy or Anarchy # 1 and #2, both from 2003, display the heads of horses on paint-splattered fields of random and repeated imagery.
Eight oversize sculptures of flora serenely occupy a top-floor gallery like tombstones in a cemetery. Reaching for the heavens or drooping toward death, they best reveal the joyful yet melancholic nature of Baechler’s complete, complex oeuvre.—Paul Laster