Mel Bochner: Money, 2006
Current exhibition
Installation Views
Overview
Quint Gallery is pleased to present Money, a 2006 painting by Mel Bochner (1940–2025), on view at 7722 Girard Avenue. Often associated with the Conceptual Art movement, Bochner’s early work—rooted in rubrics, measurements, and systems—emerged from an interest in perception and language. For years, he worked within a dematerialized conceptual framework before pivoting toward tactile, word-based paintings that redefined the role of language in the canon of contemporary art.
In 1965, Bochner began writing art criticism, and by 1966, he turned to Roget’s Thesaurus as a conceptual tool to question representation, producing portraits of fellow artists such as Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Flavin through lists of synonyms. Later, Bochner’s paintings shifted away from representing individuals and took on a more generalizing tone that was visceral, provocative, and sometimes profane.
Bochner’s Thesaurus paintings begin with a single term, accumulating synonymous words and phrases through close attention to sense, sound, and rhythm. In 2005, he began working with velvet, chosen for how oil paint sits upon rather than absorbs into other unprimed textiles like linen or silk. Taking cues from printmaking, each letter is laser-cut into an acrylic matrix, filled by hand with up to a pound of oil paint, then pressed onto the velvet with 750 tons of vertical hydraulic pressure. The resulting text is uniform in scale, but its legibility is unstable. Disrupted by shifts in color, contrast, and ground, the words hover between coherence and abstraction. As this body of work evolved across various scales and techniques, Bochner continued to pose the question of whether it is possible to read the text and see the painting simultaneously, and if the visual discordance could relieve the words from their objective meanings. Over time, he constructed a body of work that could mean nothing, something, or everything—an ongoing practice in contradiction and doubt.
Mel Bochner, who passed earlier this year at the age of 84, leaves behind a legacy represented in institutions around the world. His works can be found in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MOCA in Los Angeles, CA; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, among many others. Major exhibitions of Bochner’s work have taken place at the Yale University Art Gallery (1995); Harvard University Art Museums (2002); the Art Institute of Chicago (2006 and 2022); The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2014); Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, NY (2019).
Selected Works
