Mel Bochner (b. 1940, Pittsburgh, PA; d. 2025, New York, NY) was a pivotal figure in the emergence of Conceptual art in the 1960s, which redefined the possibilities of visual art through a wide-ranging exploration of language and materiality. Widely regarded as one of the originators of Conceptual art, Bochner’s rigorous practice engaged the structures of language—written, spoken, measured—as a medium for the production of artistic meaning.
Bochner received his BFA in painting from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962 and relocated to New York in 1964, a pivotal and transformative moment in American art. He soon became involved with contemporaries such as Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, who challenged the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. That same decade, Bochner began to work in a new mode of artistic production rooted in systems of measurement and language, culminating in the landmark 1966 exhibition Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art—now recognized as one of the first Conceptual art exhibitions.
Throughout his career, Bochner employed a range of media—painting, drawing, photography, installation, and printmaking—to examine the tension between visual image and language. His early photographic works, such as 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams (1967), and installations, like Measurement Room (1969), challenged the objectivity of perception and measurement. These works proposed that space, language, and time are not quantifiable by existing systems as they are shaped by human perception.
In the late 1970s, Bochner returned to painting with renewed interest in conceptualism, developing his series of Thesaurus and Blah, Blah, Blah works—word paintings that destabilize meaning through repetition, color, and mechanical drips. These works are as much about reading as they are about seeing, exploring the slippage between word and image. Collaborations with print studios, such as Crown Point Press and Two Palms Press, further extended this inquiry, resulting in a body of prints that push the boundaries of language and art.
A deeply influential teacher and thinker, Bochner held teaching positions at institutions such as the School of Visual Arts and Yale University, and his writings remain central to the discourse around postwar art and language. Mel Bochner’s works are held in the permanent collections of leading institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He lived and worked in New York until his passing in 2025.