TAKE A BREAK - MEL BOCHNER

I like the text and colour in his signature works and wondering how can I get take it further...

Review on Art Wednesday:

Bochner! The father of conceptual art?  We wondered as we walked in the Whitechapel Gallery where we could distinguish through the doors of Gallery 1 Mel Bochner’s dominating painting Blah, Blah, Blah made just a year ago.  how The artist used oil on velvet for this centrepiece to the exhibition, which predisposed us for the excitement and the conceptual intricacies involved. In this artistic encounter with the US artist’s work we immediately understand the pivotal importance language and colour has. Bohner uses various rationalising systems as that of measurements, numbers and definitions, to express his understandings and findings of his studies of our illogical and transitional human being.

Bochner’s work is strongly rooted to the artistic turbulence of the 60’s where modern art deprived paintings their presupposed supremacy and where language becomes constituent to it. In his own words:

‘What I wanted to understand was the nature of the conventions. Conventions give us boundaries of experience. If you examine the conventions you may find where the holes are, where a leakage exists between ‘is’ and ‘is not’.’ [1]

While walking up the stairs to Gallery 9 we came across numerous 48-inch lines, in the art work 48” Descending a Staircase (2012). We were perplexed by this almost Dadaist  approach to systems of belief where Bochner here as well as in various other works plays with the enigma of humanly defined information which though factual are of no real aid in understanding the world.

We were truly amazed by the magnitute of Bochner’s work which so beautifully addresses modern social issues where the ‘abuses of power begin with the abuse of language.’[2]. In a series of paintings Bochner writes on colour oozing canvases which were our personal favourite. In Amazing! (2011) one reads a series of words all acting as a thesaurus page of the title - awesome, groovy and gnarly -amongst others.

We found ever so stunning the sensory experience as well as the concepts, which Bochner draws upon through this selection of his works, dating nearly 50 years back. The exhibition both evokes thinking and mesmerises the viewer through Bochner’s abstractions where the means through which those are expressed act as their tangible vessel but also affect out perception of them. We surely felt privileged to catch this sought after exhibition before it tours around Europe.