Mel Bochner

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Mel Bochner (* 1940 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ; USA ; lives in New York City , USA) is an American conceptual artist , draftsman , painter and art theorist . Mel Bochner is one of the most important protagonists of 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 toured Mexico and the USA for a year and has lived in New York City since 1964. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York and intermittently at Yale University . He received his PhD in 2005 as a Doctor of Fine Arts from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University .

Bochner's first exhibition “ Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art ” took place in 1966 in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts. This exhibition is also considered to be the first exhibition of the conceptual art movement. For this exhibition, Bochner photocopied the design drawings , sketches, notes, and other material from befriended minimalist artists including a bill for $ 3,051.16 from Donald Judd , collected the copies in four black folders and displayed them on four pedestals. The exhibition was repeated in 1998 at the Drawing Center in New York.

At the end of the 1960s, Bochner did philosophical studies and studied the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein . On this basis he experimented with language, for example with Theory of Boundarys (1969/1970), where he combined color tables with sentence fragments and thus demonstrated the communicative and symbolic character of art. Mel Bochner strives for an epistemological examination of art. In his work he combines mathematical and scientific concepts with serial, geometric forms.

In 1968 Bochner realized the first works from the Measurement Rooms series , in which he measured the exhibition rooms exactly and applied the dimensions to the walls with adhesive tape.

Mel Bochner took part in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Light + Light / Idea department and was also represented with works at Documenta 6 (1977).

Bochner began to paint in the late 1970s, these pictures vary from garish works (colorful words as a picture) to more brittle works that tie in with his pioneering work.

In 2008 he was honored with admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Exhibitions

Literature and Sources

  • Achim Borchardt-Hume, Doro Globus (ed.): Mel Bochner, If the Color Changes , Munich 2013, Hirmer Verlag, ISBN 978-3-7774-8011-4
  • Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today ; Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972
  • Roland Nachtigäller , Friedhelm Scharf, Karin Stengel (eds.): Resubmission d5. A survey of the archive on Documenta 1972 (= series of publications of the documenta archive. Vol. 8). Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X .
  • Catalog for documenta 6: Volume 1: Painting, sculpture / environment, performance; Volume 2: photography, film, video; Volume 3: Hand drawings, utopian design, books; Kassel 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Irene Netta, Ursula Keltz: 75 years of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich. Ed .: Helmut Friedel. Self-published by the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-88645-157-7 , p. 228 .
personal data
SURNAME Bochner, Mel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American conceptual artist and painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh , USA