Monoprints by Mel Bochner
Monoprints by Mel Bochner
As with his paintings, the monoprints by Mel Bochner are realized through oil paint, slathered on in thick layers. To make these works, deeply carved Plexiglas plates are filled with paint, the surface is covered with paper, and a hydraulic press applies 750 tons of pressure, thus transferring the marks on the plate to soft-yet-durable sheets of handmade paper. This process results in works with surfaces so rich and tactile that they read almost as sculptural reliefs and entice touch.
Throughout his career, the artist has explored the intersection of linguistic and visual representation. His early works dissected the art object and formed the ‘analytical’ groundwork so crucial in informing the basis for the more ‘synthetic’ works of recent years. The overriding question at the heart of his project has always been the same – How do we receive and interpret different types of information?
About Mel Bochner:
Mel Bochner [born 1940] is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner became part of a new generation of artists which also included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson – artists, whom, like Bochner were looking at ways of breaking with with Abstract Expressionism and traditional compositional devices. His pioneering introduction of the use of language in the visual, led Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe his 1966 Working Drawings as ‘probably the first truly conceptual exhibition’.
Bochner came of age during the second half of the 1960s, a moment of radical change, both in society at large as well as in art. While painting slowly lost its preeminent position in modern art, language moved from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Bochner has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and of language, the way we construct and understand them, and the way they relate to one another to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world.
Mel Bochner: Language as Art 
Mel Bochner: Blah Blah Blah 