Considered one of three kids, Bochner was born to a conventional Jewish household in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1940. His father Meyer was an indication painter and his mom Minnie (née Horowitz) was a homemaker. The artist cites his father’s occupation and the time he spent as his apprentice as main influences on his artistic pursuits, recalling in a 1994 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Artwork that “paints and brushes and drawing and everything were around me all the time.”
Rising up within the Metal Metropolis, Bochner had entry to a high-quality public faculty schooling and was chosen amongst his friends to attend Saturday artwork lessons on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork from age eight via highschool. He pursued an artwork diploma on the Carnegie Institute of Expertise (now Carnegie Mellon College), observing in a 2006 interview that this system was caught between Beaux Arts and Bauhaus fashions on the time. After graduating in 1962, Bochner spent a while in Cape Cod, California, Mexico, Chicago, and again in Pittsburgh earlier than finally shifting to New York Metropolis in 1964 and discovering work as a safety guard on the Jewish Museum.
Mel Bochner, “Ass Backwards” (2019) (picture courtesy Peter Freeman Inc., New York/Paris)
Bochner’s stint on the Manhattan establishment lasted a few 12 months, as he was fired for famously falling asleep behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture, however his transfer to the Huge Apple was pivotal. He started writing critiques for Arts journal, began instructing artwork historical past on the College of Visible Arts (SVA), and fashioned a circle with artists together with Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Graham.
Throughout his first 12 months at SVA, Bochner was requested to curate the college’s Christmas drawing exhibition, the results of which was the landmark present Working Drawings and Different Seen Issues on Paper Not Essentially Meant to be Seen as Artwork (1966), a collection of 4 binders sitting on white pedestals, filled with xeroxed drawings from his mates and colleagues, studio notes, and scholarly content material from intellectuals throughout STEM fields. The exhibition has been known as a important basis for conceptual artwork.
Mel Bochner, “Blah, Blah, Blah” (2023) (picture courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc., New York/Paris and Two Palms)
All through the ’60s, Bochner built-in textual content, numbers, and mathematical or scientific diagrams into his personal apply, probing visible artwork’s relationship with language as a medium fairly than a supplemental device, in addition to the constraints, boundaries, flexibility, and permeability of language and its influence on notion. Right now, he additionally launched into his Measurements (1968–71) collection, calling on the understanding of dimensions, spatial dynamics, and fact of seeing versus realizing. Within the ’70s and ’80s, Bochner began rejecting paper and canvas’s conventional 4 corners, as a substitute his textual content works and explorations of summary geometry via sculpture and set up, murals, and custom-built angular canvases that usually exceeded 4 sides.
Left to proper: Artist James Welling, Mel Bochner, and gallerist Peter Freeman (picture by Anna Lustberg, courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc.)
Bochner is finest recognized for his stenciled, vibrantly coloured, sans serif “thesaurus paintings” that fixate on a phrase and its stream of synonyms — every with their very own particular person which means and variation from the origin — connoting language’s simultaneous freedom and instability. Within the late aughts, he turned away from representing the complexity of language via expansive phrase webs and commenced his iconic “Blah! Blah! Blah!” work, telling FAD Journal in 2020 that the supposedly mindless chatter is “a way of shorthanding a conversation.”
“You know what I’m saying, so ‘blah blah blah,’” Bochner advised FAD. “It’s a form of agreement. But it also carries a contradictory and critical meaning – what you are hearing or saying is in fact meaningless, it’s simply ‘blah blah blah.’ It’s about the emptiness, the endlessness and the darkness of the discourse.”
Bochner’s work has been featured in home and worldwide solo exhibitions over the past 5 a long time, together with main shows at Carnegie Mellon College in 1985, Yale College Artwork Gallery in 1995, the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in 2011, the Jewish Museum in 2014, and most just lately the Artwork Institute of Chicago in 2022.
Mel Bochner’s art work at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside on December 8, 2023 (picture by Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP through Getty Photographs)
Mel Bochner, “Measurement: Plants” (1969) (picture courtesy Peter Freeman Inc., New York/Paris)
Exhibition view of Mel Bochner: Seldom or By no means Seen 2004–2022 (2022) (picture courtesy Peter Freeman Inc., New York/Paris)
Set up view of Mel Bochner’s 48″ Requirements (2024) at Peter Freeman Inc. (picture courtesy Peter Freeman Inc., New York/Paris)
