Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective, 2022
Art Institute of Chicago

This exhibition is the first to use drawing as its principal organizing focus, foregrounding the importance of this body of work within the artist’s practice from its beginnings in the 1960s through the present. The show demonstrates Bochner’s pioneering role in redefining the traditional boundaries of drawing and illuminates the artist’s evolving ideas about seriality, temporality, and the slippage between word and image.

The exhibition includes nearly 90 works from all phases of his career—including several from the museum’s significant collection of Bochner’s earliest drawings—and explores the artist’s central themes of language, numbers, measurement, shape, and visual perception. Traditional drawing techniques (ink, pencil, pastel, chalk and charcoal on paper) join media as diverse as burnt matchsticks on paper, oil paint on newspaper, wall drawings in powder pigment, and, provocatively, stones arranged on the floor.