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Frank Fluegel
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Mel Bochner is considered one of the leading figures in the development of concept art. His monoprints with puns such as “Blah, Blah, Blah”, each executed as unique pieces, can be found in many museums around the world. Mel Bochner began painting in the late 1970s, creating colourful words as pictures.
At a time when painting was increasingly being discussed as outdated, Bochner became part of a new generation of artists that included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson – artists who, like Bochner, were looking for ways to break with Abstract Expressionism and traditional means of composition.
Mel Bochner came of age in the second half of the 1960s, a moment of radical change both in society as a whole and in art. While painting slowly lost its prominent position in modern art, the language of speaking about art became a part of art itself. Bochner has repeatedly examined the conventions of both painting and language, the ways in which we construct and understand them, and the ways in which they relate to each other, in order to draw our attention to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world.
Mel Bochner studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he received his B.F.A. in 1962. Since 1964 he has lived and worked in New York City. He has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe and his work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Musée National dArt Moderne in Paris.
His groundbreaking introduction of the use of language into the visual arts led art historian Benjamin Buchloh of Harvard University to describe his Working Drawings, created in 1966, as “probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.
In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University of Fine Arts. Mel Bochner has also taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He was appointed to the faculty at Yale in 1979 as a senior painter/printmaker and became a professor in 2001.
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
AUSTRALIA The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
CANADA Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
DENMARK Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde
FRANCE Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris
FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon
FRAC Bretagne, Chateaugiron
FRAC-Picardie, Amiens
GERMANY Städel Museum, Frankfurt
PORTUGAL Museu Serralves, Porto
SPAIN Reina Sofia, Madrid
SWEDEN Moderna Museet, Stockholm
SWITZERLAND Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur
UK British Museum, London
Tate, London
USA Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge
Indianopolis Museum of Art, Indianopolis
The Jewish Museum, New York
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
University Art Museum, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany
The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Selected solo exhibitions
2024 “Mel Bochner: Words Mean Everything!” The Schnitzer Collection, Portland until October 31, 2024
2022
Totah Gallery, New York, NY, US
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, US
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, US
2021
Collaborations, Copenhagen, Denmark
2020
Noire Gallery, Turin, Italy
2019
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, US
Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK
Peter Freeman Gallery, New York, NY
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY
2018
Fine Arts, Sydney, Australia
Peter Freeman, Inc., ADAA: The Art Show, New York, NY, US
2017
Simon Lee Gallery, FIAC, Louvre Museum, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France
Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, NY, US
2015
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA
Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, NY, US
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, US
2014
The Jewish Museum, NY, US
Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK
Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA
2013
Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, NY
2012
Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2013) and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2013)
Karsten Schubert Gallery, London
Egeran Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, US
Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, US
2011
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, US
Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, NY, US
© 2025 - Frank Fluegel Galerie
Obere Wörthstrasse 12 / 90403 Nürnberg / Germany / +49 911 23737500
Josef-Pirchl-Straße 6 / 6370 Kitzbühel / Austria
© 2025 - Frank Fluegel Galerie
Obere Wörthstrasse 12
90403 Nürnberg
Germany
+49 911 23737500
Josef-Pirchl-Straße 6
6370 Kitzbühel
Austria
