Dictionary of


Art  &  Artist




 

 Mel Bochner

 

Mel Bochner        Pages: 1


(b Pittsburgh, PA, 23 Aug 1940).

American conceptual artist, draughtsman, painter and writer. He studied painting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh (BFA, 1962). In 1964 Bochner moved to New York. His first exhibition (1966), described by Benjamin Buchloch as the first conceptual art exhibition, was held at the Visual Arts Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York, and titled Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art. In his work he investigated the relation between thinking and seeing. In his first mature works (1966), which are both conceptual and perceptual in basis and philosophical in content, he was interested to eliminate the ‘object’ in art and to communicate his own feelings and personal experience, and he did not wish to accept established art-historical conventions. He also experimented with word-drawings and number systems. For his Measurement series (late 1960s) he used black tape and Letraset to create line drawings accompanied by measurements directly on to walls, effectively making large-scale diagrams of the rooms in which they were installed. Bochner continued to make series of installational line drawings into the 1970s and 1980s, but from 1983 he made paintings on irregular shaped canvases that can be interpreted as meditations on drawing and the interrelation between the mind, eye and hand. They display vigorously made marks, all tracing the hand’s movement across specific surfaces. From the 1990s he was dealing with the visual and perceptual systems of perspective.
 

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