Mel Bochner valuation
Put measurement, counting and the thesaurus on the wall, and made language look like paint.
Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940 and is generally credited with one of the first exhibitions of conceptual art, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, which he mounted at the School of Visual Arts in 1966 by photocopying other artists' studio notes into four ring binders on plinths.
What a work by Mel Bochner is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940 and is generally credited with one of the first exhibitions of conceptual art, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, which he mounted at the School of Visual Arts in 1966 by photocopying other artists' studio notes into four ring binders on plinths. What followed was five decades of work in which measurement, numbering and language are the material: dimensions written directly on gallery walls, counting exercises, and from the 1990s the Thesaurus paintings, which take a word and run through its synonyms until they arrive somewhere blunt.
The Thesaurus paintings are the best-known body of work and exist as unique canvases, as monoprints, and as editions — three quite different price levels for what can look like the same image, so identifying which you have is the first task. Bochner's monoprints are individually varied within a series and are not editions in the ordinary sense; each is unique and should be described as such. The early conceptual works are often on graph paper or are wall pieces existing as certificates and instructions, where the documentation is the work.
At a glance
- Born
- 23 August 1940, Pittsburgh
- Died
- 12 February 2025, New York City
- Movement
- Conceptual art
More on Wikipedia.
Blah! Blah! Blah!, Two Palms and the surveys
Bochner began making paintings in the late 1970s. From 2008 he worked on a series built on the words Blah! Blah! Blah!, and his monoprints with the New York printer Two Palms were catalogued in Mel Bochner: Monoprints: Words, Words, Words in 2013. The National Gallery of Art in Washington gave him a retrospective in 2011, and in 2012 If the Colour Changes was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Serralves museum in Porto.
He died in New York in February 2025, aged 84. His galleries included Peter Freeman in New York and Paris. For a monoprint or an edition, the publisher's documentation, title and date are what identify it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
