Remembering Mel Bochner (1940–2025)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Mel Bochner on 12 February 2025, a pioneering figure in 20th century American art who used language and mathematics to challenge conventional artmaking techniques and systems that structure our world. He was 84 years old.

Bochner was 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, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson—artists who, like Bochner, were looking at ways of breaking 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 and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art 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 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.

Many major museums have mounted retrospectives for the artist over the course of his career: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 1985; the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 and 2022; Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France in 2007; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Münich; Fundação de Serralves, Porto in 2012–2013; and the Jewish Museum, New York in 2014. In 2019, his largest site-specific Measurement work was produced under commission for Dia: Beacon. Beyond his art practice, Bochner started teaching at Yale University in 1979 and became an adjunct professor in 2001. In 1995, the Yale University Art Gallery honored his contributions to conceptual art in a retrospective of his works from the 1960s and 1970s.

Mel Bochner and Peter Freeman had a longstanding relationship that spanned nearly 50 years. In 1976, Peter, while still a student at Harvard University, invited Mel to design the cover for the campus literary magazine Padan Aram. Thirty years later, Mel joined Peter Freeman, Inc. and has since had ten solo exhibitions at the gallery showcasing the breadth of his work, ranging from his Theory of Sculpture and conceptual photography to his acclaimed Blah, Blah, Blah paintings. Bochner’s most recent exhibition was at Peter Freeman, Inc. (November 2024 – January 2025), where he recreated his 1969 48" Standards series. For the exhibition, the gallery published a facsimile publication of his original notebook drawings, which would become the artist’s last project.