Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner ( born 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, lives in New York City, USA) is an American conceptual artist, illustrator, painter, and art theorist. Mel Bochner is one of the main protagonists of the American conceptual art.

Life and work

Mel Bochner studied painting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston. He traveled one years Mexico and the United States and lives in New York City since 1964. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York and temporarily at Yale University. He received his doctorate in 2005 for Doctor of Fine Arts from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Bochner first exhibition "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art" took place in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts in 1966. This exhibition will also serve as the first exhibition of conceptual art movement. Bochner photocopied for this exhibition, the design drawings, sketches, notes and other material from fellow minimalist artists including an invoice for $ 3,051.16 by Donald Judd, collected the specimens in four black folders and showed them four sockets. The exhibition was repeated in 1998 in the Drawing Center in New York.

In the late 1960s operational Bochner Philosophical studies and explored the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. On this basis, he experimented with the language, for example in Theory of boundarys (1969/1970), where he combined and so the communication and symbolic character of art pointed color plates with sentence fragments. Mel Bochner seeks an epistemological reflection on the art. He combines his work, mathematical and scientific concepts with serial, geometric shapes.

In 1968, Bochner realized the first works from the series of measurement Rooms, where he accurately measured the exhibition rooms and the dimensions auftrug with adhesive tape on the walls.

Robert Barry has participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Department light light / idea and was also on the Documenta 6 (1977), represented by works.

Bochner began painting in the late 1970s, these images vary from gaudy work (colorful words as an image ) to brittle plants that build on his pioneering work.

Literature and sources

  • Achim Borcharcdt - Hume, Doro Globus (ed.), Mel Bochner, If the Colour Changes, Munich, 2013, Hirmer Verlag, ISBN 978-3-7774-8011-4
  • Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
  • Documenta Archive (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X
  • Catalog for Documenta 6: Volume 1: painting, sculpture / Environment, Performance; Volume 2: Photography, Film, Video; Volume 3: drawings, utopian design, books; Kassel 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00- X
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