'During several weeks in March and April 1986, while a guest at the York House Residència, a small hotel in Lisbon, Portugal, I developed a working method suited to the...
"During several weeks in March and April 1986, while a guest at the York House Residència, a small hotel in Lisbon, Portugal, I developed a working method suited to the peculiar restrictions attendant with any attempt to use the hotel room as a studio. This resulted in an extended and continuing series of small blue ink-wash drawings and collages, all of them produced in hotel rooms.
From the start, these small blue drawings have tended to organize themselves into suites, which I have sometimes named after the location of production. The first of these is the 126-part York House Suite, after the hotel in Lisbon where the works were made.
Some of the drawings in York House Suite are based on formal models found in a primitive Portuguese children's toy, "O Construtor Infantil", which allows the construction of a limited number of human forms from a set of wooden shapes. Other drawings make reference to various paintings in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (the Portuguese National Museum), located directly across Rua das Janelas Verdes from the York House.
1995 Donald Baechler: York House Suite, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. Solo exhibition dedicated to the series of drawings "York House Suite" (1986) created in the York House Hotel in Lisbon.
Literature
Donald Baechler, York House Suite. Text by Demosthenes Davvetas. Kaleidoscope Publishers 1988, illustrated on page 27.
