Donald Baechler - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Howard House Gallery, Seattle

  • Exhibited

    Seattle, Howard House Gallery, The Red Thread: Glimpses of International Art in Vienna, March 30 – April 30, 2005

  • Catalogue Essay

    Donald Baechler's series of skull paintings focus on one of the most popular images, depicted in tattoos, warning signs, and poison bottles. A commercialised symbol, tise painted skull floats on a partially pale painted and collaged background, easing the visual intensity of the skull.

    “Victory by Default is part of Baechler's ‘Skull series’. In this piece, a painted skull gapes from the dirty yet sensuous confines of a large canvas. Terry cloth and wrinkled rags provide literal texture and reference the world outside the painting's boundaries. Splatterings of color around the skull, like the self-conscious marks of Jasper Johns, seem to express the language of painting—hue and gestural strokes—in a factual rather than illusional manner.”
    Taken from www.seattleweekly.com

  • Artist Biography

    Donald Baechler

    American • 1956

    Known for his "gee-whiz approach" to painting, in particular folksy renderings of faces and flowers, Donald Baechler became internationally known in the early 1980s at a time when his peers, like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat were making the Downtown 500 a legendary New York phenomenon. Baechler, however, painted a different tune. Highly influenced by Cy Twombly and painting pioneer Giotto, Baechler instilled his figurative explorations with at once a seriousness and an absurdity that gets at the deeper aspects of humanity.

    With works in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, and labelled one of the most important painters of his generation, Baechler maintains a market accessible for almost all level of collectors. 

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306

Victory by Default

2005
Acrylic, pigment and fabric collage on canvas.
80 x 80 in. (203.2 x 203.2 cm).
Signed and dated “DB 05" on the reverse.

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for £38,400

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London