Opening Tuesday, 19 November, 6–8pm
Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Mel Bochner’s tenth exhibition at the gallery with a selection of works from his 48″ Standards series conceived in 1969 and executed in brown paper, cardboard, and vinyl.
Each Standard consists of rectangular sheets of brown paper or cardboard arranged on a wall to contain at least one element of space or paper that measures three-by-four feet. A 48-inch measurement is always recorded twice: once across the rectangle that it describes and again along the outside of its upper or lower edge. The demarcation is not merely one of quantification; it is an investigation of the readymade systems of measurement and their limited ability to describe or define an object.
A facsimile of Bochner’s original notebook drawings for the Standards, with an essay by Jeffrey Weiss, has been published in conjunction with the exhibition. In his text for the book, Weiss writes, “For Mel Bochner, the principle of measurement is both medium and theme—an idea, a concrete operation, and a symbolic articulation of the real.” This will be the artist’s third publication with Peter Freeman, Inc. Other recent publications have accompanied his 2022 drawing retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago and a commission from Dia Beacon on the 50th anniversary of his celebrated Measurement Room (1969) originally installed at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Münich.
Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. He studied painting and philosophy, earned his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962, and moved to New York City in 1964, where he continues to live and work. His first exhibition, in 1966 at the School of Visual Arts, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, is often cited as the first exhibition of conceptual art. In 1976, Peter Freeman, while still a student, invited him to make the cover for the Harvard University campus literary magazine. Thirty years later, in 2006, Bochner joined Peter Freeman, Inc. and has mounted nine solo exhibitions at the gallery since.
Bochner’s work is included in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. In addition to the retrospective at the Art Institute and the Dia Beacon commission, recent solo exhibitions have included a show at The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2023) and a wall drawing as part of a site-specific installation series at The Menil Drawing Institute, Houston (2022–2023).