On the occasion of its second exhibition at Blanc Art Space’s pop-up project space in Beijing, Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Mel Bochner’s Blah, Blah, Blah (2011), a monumental eight-part canvas that represents the apex of his eponymous body of work. The painting acts as an altarpiece in the darkened exhibition space, as though a chapel of Blah Blah Blah, inspiring such spiritual associations as the 15th-century polyptych Ghent Altarpiece painted by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, or the more contemporary Rothko Chapel in Houston. Blah, Blah, Blah is infused with a sense of ritual and drama inherent to many forms of worship and that invokes connotations of artistic pilgrimage, bringing to mind seminal destinations including Bochner’s contemporary Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Salt Lake. As an icon of the artist’s most renowned series, Blah, Blah, Blah invites the viewer to experience a total immersion into Bochner’s central doctrine: the intersection of linguistic and visual representation.
