This fall, Magazzino Italian Art opens a special exhibition examining the formal, conceptual, and procedural affinities in the work of Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, and Lucio Fontana. Curated by Bochner in collaboration with Magazzino, the exhibition marks the first presentation to consider the American artist’s extensive, yet overlooked, engagement with the practices of Fontana and Boetti, as well as with Italian art at large. Bochner Boetti Fontana offers, through the artist’s perspective, a number of resonances between his work and that of the Italian and Italian-Argentine artists: an exploration of systems, language, and materials; and a sense of irony and humor, often and especially shared by Arte Povera and Conceptualism, as all these works opened the work of art onto the space of display. 

Beacon, NY – July 18, 2019 – On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Mel Bochner’s first Measurement Room, Dia Art Foundation has commissioned the artist to create a new, large-scale work from the series this fall at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York. Bochner’s Measurement Room: No Vantage Point opens November 9, 2019, at Dia:Beacon and will remain on view for a year.

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Installation view: Mel Bochner, Measurement Room: No Vantage Point, 1969/2019, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York. © Mel Bochner. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

Philbrook partners with the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation to present a survey of more than 50 prints by Mel Bochner. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

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The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, announces Mel Bochner and Sarah Crowner as two of the artists participating in the 2018 Carnegie International. The museum's 57th edition is curated by Ingrid Schaffner and focuses on the idea of the 'international'; to reflect upon shifting relationships between communities, with work by thirty-two artists and collectives from around the world.

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The bright yellow uppercase characters of The Joys of Yiddish spell out well-known Yiddish terms against a black background, making reference to the identifying stars Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. The installation belongs to a powerful body of work inaugurated in 2006 that centres around words and phrases found in Leo Rosten’s 1968 compendium of the same name. Growing up in an observant household in which Yiddish was regularly spoken, Bochner developed an interest in the assimilation of the language into the American English vernacular. Through Jewish comedians of the 1950s Yiddish became a familiar part of the American discourse. Yet the light-hearted resonance so often associated with the Yiddish language masks a deeper and darker cultural significance that speaks of the survival of a persecuted people.

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