1998

Tree

American, 1956 - 2022

Faint traces of images-mostly indecipherable-lurk around the dark branches of Tree, intentionally revealing Baechler's working process. The artist had come across a timeworn copper plate in his print publisher's office, where it was serving as a tabletop, and made two etchings from it, of which Tree is the second. Before making Tree, Baechler immersed the plate in a chemical bath to remove almost all of the previous imagery, leaving only ghostly remains of the first print, Crowd, which depicts a cluster of cartoonlike heads.