Mel Bochner

A leading figure in the Conceptual Art movement in 1960s and 70s New York, Mel Bochner was one of the first artists to use language as an artistic medium. Exploring the point at which language and visual representation intersect, his text-based paintings place words out of context, exploring the fine line between meaningful and meaningless.

Based on synonyms found in Roget's Thesaurus, in 1966 he created his first ‘Thesaurus Portraits’, a subject he reprised in 2001 with a series of paintings and drawings featuring snippets of everyday speech. One of his best-known pieces, Blah, Blah, Blah (2008), shows a single word, repeated in painted capital letters - a phrase that can mean both everything, and nothing. “The viewer should enter the idea through a visual or phenomenological experience rather than simply reading it,” says the artist.

Born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bochner was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home. After graduating with a BFA in 1962 from Carnegie Mellon University, he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum in New York, where his painting, The Joys of Yiddish, hangs today. During his time in New York, he began teaching at the School of Visual Arts - the setting for his first solo show in 1966, titled ‘Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art’. Cited as the first exhibition of Conceptual art, it is now considered a seminal piece of art history.