Artist

Mel Bochner

b. 1940 · American

Mel Bochner emerged in New York in the 1960s as a central figure in Conceptual art, using measurements, language, diagrams and serial systems to question how artworks communicate information. His 1966 exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art helped redefine the exhibition itself as a field of propositions rather than precious objects. He later returned forcefully to painting, making language-based works in which thesaurus chains, color and painterly excess complicate the coolness associated with early Conceptualism.

Conceptual art; painting; drawing; installation