For much of his career, the artist Donald Baechler, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, was the victim of mistaken identity. Having come of age in Manhattan, New York, in the 1980s at the same time as the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and represented by the same dealer, Tony Shafrazi, and because his work, like theirs, looked streetwise, Baechler was widely categorised as a graffiti artist. He was not.
The mistake had come about when he asked a friend for an introduction to Shafrazi, ex-gallerist to his old art school hero, the conceptualist Joseph Kosuth. To his surprise, the dealer – who had by then moved on from conceptualism to graffiti art – offered him a show. The fame Shafrazi brought him was to prove something of a poisoned chalice. He was, he said, always to “feel like a fish out of water” at the gallery.
