MEL BOCHNER (b. 1940, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a central figure in the development of conceptual art whose work examines how the prevailing conventions of language and painting were constructed, and how their modes of interaction are indicative of our engagement with the world.
Emerging as a leader of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s-70s, Bochner sought to challenge the traditional compositional devices of Abstract Expressionism; his first exhibition of drawings is considered one of the founding works of Conceptualism. His work pulls from philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Language, in Bochner's works, was no longer simply a mode to discuss art, but instead became part of the art itself. The artist challenges the notion of language as communication, and focuses on the cerebral association of certain words.
Bochner lives and works in New York. He has been the subject of a recent drawing retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago (2022) and received a commission at Dia Beacon (2019-2021). He has had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2023); Art Institute of Chicago (2022); Dia:Beacon, New York (2019); and Jewish Museum, New York (2014). He has been included in group exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (2020); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); Jewish Museum, New York (2020); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (2018); Tate Modern, London (2018); Met Breuer, New York (2017); British Museum, London (2017); National Gallery, Washington D.C. (2016); and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2016). Bochner's work can be found in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.