John Baeder’s “Stardust” on view at MOCA’s “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968.”

John Baeder, Stardust, oil on canvas, 1976, Collection of Yale University Art Gallery

We are pleased to note the inauguration of the MOCA exhibition Ordinary People Photorealism and Work of Art since 1968, including the magnificent oil painting Stardust by John Baeder.

John Baeder, b. 1938, grew up in Atlanta, GA, and studied art at Auburn University. Moving to New York, Baeder became a prominent art director working at McCann Erickson in the Mad Men era before giving up a lucrative commercial career to devote himself full time to painting. His work was discovered in 1972 by legendary dealer Ivan Karp of OK Harris Gallery who was looking for works of "cultural consequence with visual power"

Baeder's work has focused on diners, gas stations, motels, roadside attractions and other structures, reflecting back to us their importance in our collective memory and consciousness.

Vincent Scully, Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, distinguished Baeder's work from other photorealists:

“John Baeder's paintings seem to me to differ from those of his brilliant Magic-Realist contemporaries as they are gentle, lyrical, and deeply in love with their subjects… Baeder is not haunted like Hopper by a sense of something empty, hollow, and solitary in the American experience. Instead, he is youthful, hopeful, a painter-poet who makes us see the beauty of common things—not how funny they are, or how disgusting, or how powerfully expressive even, or how frightening, or just how big—but how lovely, how seen with love… Baeder is entirely at home in his world, and he irradiates it.”

Baeder's work is held in numerous international collections including the Whitney Museum of Art; the Smithsonian; the Denver Art Museum; the Morris Museum; Yale University Gallery, and many others. He is the subject of the biography and catalogue raisonné "John Baeder's Road Well Taken" by curator Jay Williams, Vendome Press, 2015.

Currently living in Nashville, Baeder's work is co-represented by MB Abram, Los Angeles, and ACA Galleries, New York.