Background
Mel Bochner was born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States to a family of a sign painter.
5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States
Carnegie Mellon University
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Northwestern University
1109 5th Ave & E 92nd St, New York, NY 10128, United States
Jewish Museum
209 E 23rd St, New York, NY 10010, United States
School of Visual Arts
New Haven, Connecticut 06520, United States
Yale University
32 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Harvard University Art Museums
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom
Tate Modern
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603, United States
Art Institute of Chicago
6th & Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20565, United States
National Gallery of Art
77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX, United Kingdom
Whitechapel Gallery
Mel Bochner near his 'Working Drawings' at the exhibition in the School of Visual Arts in New York City, 1966
(The book chronologically documents the work and ideas of ...)
The book chronologically documents the work and ideas of Mel Bochnert over a span of forty years, as well as providing a unique perspective on the conceptual and post-minimal art scene in New York.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262026317/?tag=2022091-20
2008
Mel Bochner was born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States to a family of a sign painter.
Mel Bochner’s artistic talent was recognized for the first time when he did his studies in a high school. Young Bochner received the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards scholarship provided by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.
Then, he pursued his education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (currently Carnegie Mellon University) from which he graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Then, Bochner had learned philosophy for a time at the Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.
In 2005, he received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from his almamater Carnegie Mellon University.
Mel Bochner began his career in New York City where he came in 1964. Firstly, to earn his living, he worked as a guard at The Jewish Museum. While serving, Bochner met a famous art critic Dore Ashton. Two years later, the latter provided the young artist with a teacher’s post at the School of Visual Arts in New York City where Bochner taught art history.
The same year, he had his first solo exhibition called ‘Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art' at the School of Visual Arts. Mel Bochner presented the photocopies of his friends’ artworks which he put in four black folders placed on four platforms. The show received good reviews and was considered as an important event in the development of the Conceptual art.
The year of his artistic debut, Bochner produced his first photo artworks, such as ‘36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams’ demonstrated at the Dwan Gallery of New York City in 1967. In a couple of years, the visitors of the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich, Germany had a possibility to admire his famous ‘Measurement: Room’.
Besides his involvement in the visual art of this period, Bochner proved himself a talented art critic and author by creating series of essays on minimalism and early conceptualism. Among his early writings were ‘Art in Process – Structures’, ‘Serial Art Systems: Solipsism’, both published in the Arts Magazine and ‘The Serial Attitude’ which appeared in the Artforum magazine in 1967.
At the end of the next decade, Mel Bochner began to work with paintings. Fascinated by the idea of the relations between language and painting, he incorporated words in his colorful canvases and monotypes, as he did in his Thesaurus paintings with the synonyms.
In 1979, Bochner became a teacher's assistant at the Yale University and fulfilled the duties of a senior critic in painting and printmaking as well. Since 2001, he has worked as an adjunct professor at the institution.
The year of 1985 was marked by the huge retrospective of Bochner’s art titled ‘Mel Bochner:1973-1985’ held at the Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery and later shown in the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. One more retrospective was organized ten years later at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, later in Brussels and Munich.
At the solo show in Sonnabend Gallery in 2000, the artist presented the canvases using the German and English versions of writings of a philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The subsequent years, Mel Bochner continued his active participation at many international solo and group exhibitions, including the shows at the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002), the third in his career Whitney Biennial of 2004, the Tate Modern in London (2005), the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), the National Gallery of Art (2011), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2014) and many others.
The recent solo shows of Mel Bochner were organized at the Simon Lee Gallery in Hong Kong, China, at the Peter Freeman, Inc. in New York City both in 2017, and at the Art Dealers Association of America’s Art Show of 2018.
Nowadays, the artist lives and works in New York City.
(The book chronologically documents the work and ideas of ...)
2008Pythagoras (2)
Language is not Transparent
Pythagoras (1)
Nothing
Pythagoras (3)
Portrait of Eva Hesse
Old
Language is Not Transparent
Four Shapes
Meaningless
Crazy
Blah, Blah, Blah
Pythagoras (4)
Oh Well
Money
Vulgar
Language is Not Transparent
Irascible
Talk is Cheap
Going Out of Business
If / And / Either / Both (Or)
Silence!
Planar Arc
Tangency
Skeleton (Secant)
Study for Aggregate
Arena
Quotations:
"My feeling was that there were ways of extending, or re-inventing visual experience, but that it was very important that it remain visual. The viewer should enter the idea through a visual or phenomenological experience rather than simply reading it."
"Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was."
Quotes from others about the person
"In Bochner’s work, perception constantly trumps idea, reaffirming the artist’s belief that the sensuous is an essential element in even the most conceptual art." Eleanor Heartney, author and editor of Art in America magazine