Donald Baechler - Globe
American, b.1956
Globe, 2001
Screenprint, 52 x 39 inches
Edition 53/60
Pace Editions Inc.
01.009

Purchase by the William Davidson Institute

Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baechler is grouped with a second-generation of pop artists who emerged in the early 1980s. His sources draw upon children’s art, folk art and commercial illustration. In his paintings, drawings and prints, he often gathers these sources together in a collage-like manner that weds cartoonish drawing and serious technique.

As he did in a series of earlier prints, Baechler isolates a motif from popular culture in Globe. He presents his subject as though it was a portrait, and surrounds it with a miscellany of signs, symbols, and patterns. Although random-seeming at first, the composition is subtly balanced in terms of color and shapes. He echoes the circular globe with star, oval, and flower motifs. Even the incongruous bugle in the upper left and the dotted and starred pattern strips continue the artist's rhyming of shapes. Both light-hearted and enigmatic, Baechler leaves final meanings up to the viewer's own personal associations.