Donald Baechler (born 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1974–1977, studying for his B.F.A. in Painting, and Cooper Union from 1977-1978 for his MFA. Dissatisfied with New York City, he proceeded to the Staatliche Hochschule fuer Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Baechler returned to New York City in 1980, working as a guard at Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room. He was soon a part of a burgeoning Lower Manhattan arts scene, showing in the East Village and exhibition spaces such as Artists Space and the Drawing Center. Baechler and Tony Shafrazi struck up an acquaintance over a shared interest in artist Joseph Kosuth. 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.
Baechler's early work was noted for childlike imagery and thematics—associations which have recurred throughout his career. "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. It's a myth, of course: children are hardly angelic, and alienation is the state of humanity—while Beachler's art works hard to achieve its trademark appearance of prelapsarian sincerity and artlessness."