Mel Bochner: Color as Shape/Shape as Color

Opening reception: Saturday January 12, 2008 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Mel Bochner’s Color as Shape/Shape as Color, an exhibition of wall paintings and related drawings from the 1970’s. Bochner has never made drawings simply for the purpose of mark making. Instead, he explores the connections between thinking and seeing to investigate the formal properties and functions of art and to question its conceptual foundations.

This exhibition features an historical series of drawings begun in 1973. The works, rendered in pastel, charcoal and goauche, are lyrical and bold. Featuring flat planes of rich color these complex compositions reveal Bochner’s constant search for new organizational principles based on the combination of pentagons, squares and triangles.

“One of the beauties of these three shapes is that they create an infinite number of unpredictable combinations. And because of the way geometry and biology are intertwined, the combinations are simultaneously geometric and organic.”

The vibrant abstract cadence of works like Syncline Studies (above) anticipate his later, more formal considerations from the 1980’s and 1990’s of numbers, grids and language. Bochner’s investigation of figure and ground, shape, color and surface lend insight into his thought process and aesthetic philosophy. Especially for this occasion, Bochner will recreate in the gallery, for the first time in almost twenty years, one of his large wall paintings from the mid-1970’s.

Mel Bochner
Color as Shape/Shape as Color
A Wall Painting and Related Drawings from the 1970’s