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Mel Bochner recent drawings
at Lawrence Markey
San Antonio, TX
October 23–December 4, 2009
Lawrence Markeyis pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works on paper by Mel Bochner.
This will be Bochner’s third one-person exhibition at Lawrence Markey and the first in San Antonio. Past exhibitions at Lawrence Markey (in New York) were “Drawings 1966-1973” (with an accompanying catalogue) in 1998 and “Numbers, 1966-2001” in 2001.
The works in this exhibition are from Mel Bochner’s recent language based Thesaurus and Blah, Blah,
Blah, series.
Linguistic systems and their relationship to knowledge and perception have been used as creative capital throughout Mel Bochner’s extensive career. His Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed As Art ,1966 and his wall drawing Language is Not Transparent,1970 are cornerstones of Conceptual Art.
In a 2006 interview with James Meyer, Bochner states:
Every choice of material, the kind of paper or pen or masking tape I used, carried specific intentions
and implications...Certain things, like how language is related to time, can be uniquely encoded in the act of painting itself.
In 2002 I came across a new edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. Not only did it include very up-to-date vernacular and slang, but outright obscenity as well. Because the thesaurus gets into the hands of fairly young children, that signaled a dramatic change in what is considered “ordinary” language. Something had happened to the boundaries of public discourse–politically, conceptually, and morally–and I wanted to explore that. (Mel Bochner Language 1966-2006, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007).
Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1940. He received his BFA in 1962 from Carnegie Mellon University which also awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2005. His work has been shown widely in the United States and abroad, with solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge; Museum of Modern
and Contemporary Art, Geneva; and the Centro de Arte Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. In 1995 Yale University Art Gallery organized a retrospective, Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966–1973, and in
2004 he was included in the Whitney Biennial. His work is in numerous permanent collections including the Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Bochner’s Win! was recently commissioned and installed in the new Dallas Cowboys football stadium in Arlington, TX. Mel Bochner lives and works in New York.
Please also visit melbochner.net for further information.