(born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940)
‘Blah, Blah, Blah’, 2014, signed, dated Bochner 2014, monoprint with collage, engraving and embossment on hand-dyed with watercolour hand made paper, 235 x 195 cm, framed

Provenance:
Studio of the artist - acquired there directly by the present owner

Bochner was one of the first artists who introduce language into the visual field in the 1960s. As an advocate of conceptual art, Mel Bochner defined the synonym painting = writing, according to which the design of the picture was predetermined by a specified number of lines and letters.
Language as Placeholder, a way to keep our attention without positing an argument, demanding an answer, or necessarily even exhibiting a clear reason of itself.
The large-format Blah Blah Blah paintings, the basis of the editions, were created in 2011 expressly for Bochner‘s exhibition in the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The randomly selected final proof papers of the editions serve as background noise, against which the meaningless communication takes place. „The balance between pictorial and linguistic interpretation becomes a theme in the ‘Blah Blah Blah’ series (...) The mute litany of the phoneme appears out of and sinks into the dark depths of the colour, the phoneme which serves as a cross-linguistic cliché for redundant gibberish. A loose, almost expressive style characterises the paintings. They appear as radical caricatures of oral fluency which, in our atmosphere of speech in which communication is celebrated as a goal in itself, rises up and subsides in white noise.“
Ulrich Wilmes, in: Künstler – Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Mel Bochner, 90/9, 2010

„We still do not know how much less nothing can be“
Mel Bochner

Provenance:
Studio of the artist - acquired there directly from the present owner

Bochner was one of the first artists who introduce language into the visual field in the 1960s. As an advocate of conceptual art, Mel Bochner defined the synonym painting = writing, according to which the design of the picture was predetermined by a specified number of lines and letters.
Language as Placeholder, a way to keep our attention without positing an argument, demanding an answer, or necessarily even exhibiting a clear reason of itself.
The large-format Blah Blah Blah paintings, the basis of the editions, were created in 2011 expressly for Bochner‘s exhibition in the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The randomly selected final proof papers of the editions serve as background noise, against which the meaningless communication takes place. „The balance between pictorial and linguistic interpretation becomes a theme in the ‘Blah Blah Blah’ series (...) The mute litany of the phoneme appears out of and sinks into the dark depths of the colour, the phoneme which serves as a cross-linguistic cliché for redundant gibberish. A loose, almost expressive style characterises the paintings. They appear as radical caricatures of oral fluency which, in our atmosphere of speech in which communication is celebrated as a goal in itself, rises up and subsides in white noise.“
Ulrich Wilmes, in: Künstler – Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Mel Bochner, 90/9, 2010

„We still do not know how much less nothing can be“
Mel Bochner