A member of the East Village New York art scene in the 1980s, Donald Baechler's multi media works, consisting of paintings, collage, sculpture and drawings, depicts childhood imagery and harkens back to nostalgic memorabilia such as school books, old maps and children's drawings, as well as familiar motifs such as ice cream cones and soccer balls, amongst others. While his works has been critiqued as evoking innocence and sincerity, Baechler sees himself as an abstract artist whose aesthetic is primarily formal, based in line, color, shape and composition. He focuses more on the attributes than the narrative. Baechler's technique is based in the collection of popular images and objects which has become the archive of years of photography and gathering ephemera. His artwork is a concise version of this cummulative process, built in fragments and layers to create what he calls “illusions of history.”
