One among three youngsters, Bochner was born to a standard 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 college schooling and was chosen amongst his friends to attend Saturday artwork courses on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork from age eight by means of 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 transferring 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 yr, as he was fired for famously falling asleep behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture, however his transfer to the Massive Apple was pivotal. He started writing critiques for Arts journal, began educating 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 yr at SVA, Bochner was requested to curate the varsity’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 Considered as Artwork (1966), a sequence of 4 binders sitting on white pedestals, stuffed 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 essential 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 observe, probing visible artwork’s relationship with language as a medium somewhat than a supplemental instrument, in addition to the restrictions, boundaries, flexibility, and permeability of language and its affect on notion. At the moment, he additionally launched into his Measurements (1968–71) sequence, 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 an alternative his textual content works and explorations of summary geometry by means of sculpture and set up, murals, and custom-built angular canvases that always exceeded 4 sides.
Left to proper: Artist James Welling, Mel Bochner, and gallerist Peter Freeman (photograph 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 by means of expansive phrase webs and started 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 instructed 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 during the last 5 many years, together with main displays 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 lately the Artwork Institute of Chicago in 2022.
Mel Bochner’s paintings at Artwork Basel Miami Seashore on December 8, 2023 (photograph by Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP through Getty Photos)
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)