until Sunday June 23 2013

Haus der Kunst
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The American artist Mel Bochner (born in 1940) is considered one of the founders of Conceptual Art and is thus part of a generation of artists that radically broke with painting's dominant position in the early 1960s.

Bochner primarily realized this by introducing language into his work. In his more recent pieces, however, Bochner increasingly deals with examining this once-maligned medium. Here, his own conceptual pictorial language offers him insight into new possibilities of painting.

In the exhibition, works are presented from all of Bochner's creative phases, including his early small sculptures and drawings, as well as installations, murals, photographs, and paintings, beginning with the work "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art", which Bochner presented in 1966 in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The show is regarded as Conceptual Art’s first exhibition, and it was pivotal for the movement’s development. Bochner later explored various themes, such as the theory of painting, as well as reproduction and transformation, which he investigated in depth in a photographic series.