Mel Bochner: Drawing from Four Decades

This winter, the San Diego Museum of Art is presenting a major survey of the drawing practice of pioneering conceptual artist, Mel Bochner. Featuring 29 works that cover the range of Bochner's artistic interests from 1966 to 2005, this nationally touring exhibition examines the central role drawing has played in the artist's work throughout his career.

Mel Bochner is one of the most important New York-based conceptual artists, who along with Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and others, explored the relationship between thinking and seeing in the visual arts. This special exhibition looks at Bochner's preoccupation with this relationship as it tracks the continuity of his various experimentations throughout his four decade-long career.

Bochner's drawings, many composed on notebook, bond, or graph paper, illustrate not only the artist's working methods, but also the importance of the various stages of works in progress. In addition, the drawings outline Bochner's use of simple mathematical formulas, seriality, and superimposition to define the invisible framework that is part of the art-making process.

Discarding conventional techniques, Bochner's works reference mundane, commonplace objects, such as blocks and pebbles, and functional operations, such as measurements and diagrams, to analyze everyday social interactions. His interest in language is also reflected in several drawings that incorporate linguistic content, such as series of words and repeated sentences.

Mel Bochner: Drawing from Four Decades is organized by the Fifth Floor Foundation. Local presentation of this exhibition is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, the County of San Diego's Community Enhancement Program, and members of the San Diego Museum of Art.

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