Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Charlottenburg

Crone Berlin

Donald Baechler: Flowers

27. August – 23. Oktober 2021

We are very pleased to present the solo exhibition Flowers by US-American artist Donald Baechler in our Berlin gallery. On display are 35 paintings that bridge the gap between his early works from the 1980s and his most recent artistic productions.

Donald Baechler was born in 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut and has been known as an important representative of the American Neo-Expressionist and Post-Pop Art movement for almost four decades. With clear, powerful lines he fixes depictions of simple objects onto what appears to be a flat background. Drawing attention to the fore, the cut-out quality of the images overshadows what lies hidden underneath the richly textured backdrop. Layer by layer, he aligned, fused, reduced, and coated over the pictorial elements of the image until it became the still life floating untethered within its borders.

„The ghost of the earlier version is always there, underneath the paint, along the edges. Sometimes you can see it and sometimes you cannot, but you can sense it in the repetition and slight changes along the edges. They are not just black paintings on a white-grey background. The black is in the white and not on the white. The image is in the painting,” Baechler explains.

Galerie Crone first showed a solo exhibition by Donald Baechler in 1985. Flowers is a continuation of this exhibition in which five works that were on view then are juxtaposed to his latest series portraying variations of flowers and flowers arrangements. Illustrating the ways in which he has remained true to his artistic intentions and stylistics, the show reflects the influences and changes he has impressively managed to take up and transform into a persevering visual language over time.