Lime and Lemons : More art I like: Mel Bochner

Thursday, 29 December 2011

More art I like: Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner's paintings explore words, and their meaning. His website is here. Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1940. He lives and works in New York. A valuable review article about his work, locating him firmly in the emerging conceptual art movement from the mid 1960s, is taken from Frieze magazine in March 2007, and can be found here. He worked closely with friend and fellow conceptual artist Sol Lewitt, exploring drawing, measurement, spatial relationships and colour.

HIs word paintings are many and concentrate on a single word or phrase, or more recently on related words and phrases, rather like a thesaurus entry, bringing together words which have similar meaning, and in the process exploring the texture behind emotions or descriptions like "Unnameable" or "Useless". He uses very simple script, capital letters, no frills, often in multi-coloured canvases, so the first impression is of a child-like randomness. But on closer reading, the words have coherence and emotional force. The simplicity is compelling, as is the use of often vivid odours. Sometimes the works are in repeated handwritten script, sometimes large, sometimes quite small in scale. Here are two of his thesaurus paintings from 2008