MEL BOCHNER

SELECTED WORKS
BIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARTIST TALKS
IN MEMORIAM

Mel Bochner left an immediate and strong impression on whomever met him—his concretely palpable identity was nevertheless rich in contrasts, complexities and contradictions.
 
He navigated within his own deep odyssey, dense in artistic, philosophical knowledge and discoveries—delivering his message parsimoniously with implacable clarity. His abrasive intellect walked hand in hand with an unassuming (self) derision, and his kvetching tendencies never outshined his colorful enthusiasm. It’s rare to encounter this level of sophistication cohabiting with a sincere sense of humility. His achievements seemed outweighed only by a rigorously curious mind, a staggering intelligence, and an ability to invest even the most solemn of moments with levity and mischievous irreverence. Humor was, for him, the ultimate form of misdirection.

Blah Blah Blah and Ha Ha Ha would become post-minimal touchstones, simultaneously beacons and conduits of ideological rebellion. The scripted repetition of synonyms became meditation; ‘elucidation without tone,’ as he would describe them. All works did double duty, communicating through a saturated and sensuous visual matrix while questioning the very mode of the exchange. More than anything perhaps, was the sensory balanced within the theoretical—a seemingly impossible, oxymoronic feat. Of course, Mel Bochner was always a companion of impossibility.
 
In the 1960s, Mel became part of a new generation of artists—alongside Eva Hesse, Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt—who broke with abstract expressionism. His use of objects, ephemera, systems of measurement, and even gallery walls as subjects critically altered and implicated the viewer. Language in particular would occur to him as a cipher—symbols which behaved as identifiers while doing the identifying.
 
Starting in the 1970s, he used pigment and text in an intellectually challenging, contradictory delivery system. Considering himself “always a painter, who just didn’t happen to paint,” this was a return in a sense, to tools that had been put aside until the time was right. In 2013 Nicholas Cullinan called him an heir to Matisse, and “among the most compelling colorists of our age.”1

Ever provocative, in 2023 he explained to James Meyer on the public stage at the National Gallery of Art: “I don't really believe in ideas. And for a work of art, to be a work of art in my estimation…there has to be something visual, something for the viewer to read, something to question, something to make them angry, but something to engage them. But—there are lots of ways that things can be visual.”

Mel was involved in seven exhibitions at the gallery, including two solo shows, and a public screening of the film Blah Blah Blah: Mel Bochner In His Own Words, directed by his wife, Lizbeth Marano. The film deftly illustrates the clear linearity connecting early and later works. Mel would often touch on this, reflecting “it’s hard for people to see the through-line that goes from the ultra-conceptual, stripped-down, so-called early stuff to the work that I’m doing now, which, let’s just say, I give myself more emotional permission to make. But I don’t think it’s any less conceptual.”2
 
TOTAH’s inaugural 2016 exhibition, Bochner Boetti, devised with Mel through the dust and rubble of the gallery’s former liquor store life, was the first to pair just the two artists. Mel, who met Boetti in Turin in the early 1970s, identified in him a shared courtship of unpredictability amidst the radical Italian art scene of the 1960s. The nature of their work together—Boetti’s embroideries vibrating with letters and script; Bochner’s sharp text saturated in rich color— underscored both artists’ mastery in stimulating intellect and senses, offering multiple entry points leading to infinite possibilities. Jeremy Sigler observed how “both artists began in defiance—against art’s traditional status, privileges, preciousness, and value."3
 
The Bochner Boetti show was expanded upon in Magazzino Italian Art’s 2021 Bochner Boetti Fontana, curated by Mel, drawing out the unique cadence of their work in dialogue. It included his Meditation on the Theorem of Pythagoras (1972/1993), which started to take shape after Mel visited the Temple of Pythagoras in Metaponto in the summer of 1972 (“a modest doric structure in ruins”4), and laid an arrangement of pebbles directly beside it. This iterated into chunks of Murano glass from Fontana’s studio, a lucid homage, unphased by objects of beauty. The work is currently installed in Mel’s memory at Magazzino’s isotropic pavilion.

His vibrant work often surprised younger viewers, who were astonished to discover Mel’s career had already spanned over 60 years. He never seemed to age, but instead retained the dynamism of a an eternally young artist. Just as Mel once described Sol Lewitt, he too “remained an old young artist.”
 
His impact is vast and always expanding. Multiple works were restaged decades after they were first conceived, without losing an ounce of relevancy. The enthusiasm for and dedication to projects we shared energized us symbiotically. Mel lives on as an inspiration to us all, and his essence will continue to imbue the walls of the gallery.
 

Mel Bochner (Pittsburgh, August 23, 1940 – New York, February 12, 2025)





 

1 Nicholas Cullinan, 'Mel Bochner,' Artforum, February 2013
2 'A talk between Mel Bochner and Carroll Dunham 50 years in the making,' Interview Magazine, April 7, 2021
3 Jeremy Sigler, 'Mel Bochner's Torah,' Tablet Magazine, December 15, 2017
4 Mel Bochner, 'Italian Days,' Bochner Boetti Fontana: Magazzino Italian Art, 2021 

Published March 2025