Remembering Conceptual Artist Mel Bochner

You know what I’m saying, so ‘blah blah blah’

- Mel Bochner

Conceptual artist Mel Bochner died on Wednesday, February 12 at age 84.

 

Bochner was born in Pittsburgh on Aiugust 23, 1940. He said that working with his father, who was a sign painter, had a profound influence on his work. Bochner earned a degree in art from Carnegie Melon and moved to New York in 1964. He got a job as a security guard at the Jewish Museum, but was fired after falling asleep behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture.

 

Things eventually worked out well for Bochner. He wrote reviews for ARTS magazine and taught art history at the School of Visual Arts where, in 1966, he curated the groundbreaking conceptual art show Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art  that launched his career.

 

Bochner used language and mathematics to explore concepts that challenged the meaning of art.

 

In 2004, Bochner's work was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and at London's Tate Modern in 2005. His pieces are held in several major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art. In 2011, a retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

 

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 The world is very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much. Looking at the world is good for you.
- David Hockney

 

David Hockney (b.1937) has inspired and is supporting a year-long, nation-wide project in the UK, centered in his hometown of Bradford, England.  DRAW! encourages people to draw and share their work.

 

Hockney has been drawing the objects, landscapes and people in front on him for more than sixty years.

 

 

Hockney moved to California in 1964. He took long drives and painted what the roads, cities, landscapes, family, friends  and, of course, the swimming pools. On a trip to Mexico, car trouble forced Hockney to stop and find a hotel. The drawings he did, of the Hotel Acatlan, became part of his Moving Focus Series, works that played with perspective.

 

Hotel Acatlán: Two Weeks Later, available at VFA, is just one of the many works that Hockney created during his trip. Hotel Acatlán: Two Weeks Later was done on the return leg of his trip. The figure in the lower right corner of this print refers to his 1954 portrait of his mother, Woman with a Sewing Machine.

 

 

Hockney worked with master printmaker Kenneth Tyler on the Moving Focus Series. Works from the series can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Collection, the National Gallery of Australia, the Government Art Collection,UK,  the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis the Smithsonian Museum in and  other major venues.

 

An exhibit of work that Hockney did on some of his travels around L.A. and some of his recent works are currently on view at the Pal Springs Art Museum. David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation will be on exhibit through March 31, 2025.

 

Hockney has embraced technology to create much of his work. Before we took pictures with our phones, he was using Polaroids, printers and movie cameras to record images.

 

 Some of his early experiments, in the 1980s, were done at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. Hockney created large photocollages, that he called joiners. One of the joiners on display shows the museum in its early days as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in 1985, and has not been on display for 25 years.

 

David Hockney: Pieced Together will be on exhibit at the National Science and Media Museum through May 18, 2025.

 

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 A painting by Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera (1915-2022) is now hanging in the White House. It is the first work by a Hispanic or Latine artist represented in the White House’s permanent art collection. 

 

Dia Feriado (Holiday), 2011, a green and orange circular geometric painting, was acquired by the Committee for the Preservation of the White House under Jill Biden and is now hanging in the East Wing.

 

 

Herrera painted sharp-edged, minimalist works throughout her life, but  did not gain major recognition until the age of 89. 

 

In 2019, her painting, Blanco y Verde, 1966, sold at Sotheby’s for $2.9 million. 

 

Herrera's work can be found in collections of major institutions around the world, such as the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Pérez Art Museum in  Miami among many others.

 

Carmen Herrera died on February 12, 2022, at the age of 106

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the work of Mel Bochner, David Hockney, Carmen Herrera or any of the other fine artists whose works are available at VFA.

 

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February 19, 2025