“I am thinking about the relationship between language and color. How color can relieve a text of its duty to meaning. At the root of all my work is the recognition that we tend to take most of our experience for granted.” Mel Bochner
Executed in 2018 in an attractive, primarily azure palette, Blah Blah Blah is a stellar example of Conceptual artist Mel Bochner’s pioneering exploration of the cerebral and visual associations of words. Stacked neatly upon one another in the artist’s signature font of rounded, capital letters, the BLAHs are formed by vibrantly colored and richly textured pigments that shift the focus of the work away from the literal meaning of the words, and instead, to the ironically engaging composition. In the early 1960s alongside artists such as Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, Bochner strove to break away from the dominant style of Abstract Expressionism, and became a leading figure in the Conceptual art movement, developing a unique visual language that is still influential and distinctly relevant today.
DEAN PROJECT, Miami
Private Collection, New York