[1] Baechler was interested in art at a young age, after his mother died, and started painting in collaboration with his maternal grandmother, who was a painter.

[4][5] Dissatisfied with New York City, he proceeded to the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

[8] Shafrazi was developing an interest in graffiti-oriented works, and founded a downtown gallery that represented Baechler, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and eventually Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I always used to tell people, 'I'm an abstract artist before anything else,' For me, it's always been more about line, form, balance and the edge of the canvas—all these silly formalist concerns—than it has been about subject matter or narrative or politics.

[16] "Like Art Brut," wrote Steven Vincent in Art in America, "Donald Baechler's seemingly ingenuous depictions of everyday objects and simple figures succeed in large part by tapping into our nostalgia for childhood, that period of life before the rivening onset of self-consciousness and guilt.

[18][19][20] Grace Glueck of The New York Times noted "echoes of Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein,"[21] while Edward Leffingwell of Art in America characterized Baechler's approach as "some strange and uncompromising posture out of Otterness and Rodin.

"[22] Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a 1993 exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery: "Mr. Baechler jams together pages from children's copy books, maps of Africa and Europe, sketches of toys (beach balls, building blocks) and the reiterated form—emphatic and phallic—of an upheld thumb.

In one drawing several thumbs fill the inside of an outlined head, perhaps giving a clue to the darker undercurrents in Mr. Baechler's work as a whole.

Art, like play, he seems to suggest, is just a method for keeping chaos at bay, and these days even the best-behaved child knows he's under somebody's thumb.

"[18] Alex Hawgood, in a 2008 profile in The New York Times, summarized ...."Baechler ... is known for his sunny, multimedia work that explores the language of cultural symbols.

"Baechler," wrote Edward Leffingwell of Art in America, "scatters his surfaces with the detritus of childhood, portraying the adult today through the images of a past not quite left behind.