Barry Schwabsky

Jeremy Sigler

David Totah

Steppenwolf

Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. He pioneered the introduction of the use of language in the visual, probing the way they relate to one another to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our visual engagement with the world. Featuring color plates of more than thirty new, previously unpublished paintings, and accompanied by an essay by Jeremy Sigler, this handsome publication offers a new perspective on Mel Bochner's career-long engagement with language and painting. Sigler points to how Bochner's newest images poignantly signal a return to visceral materiality, revealing the unexpected painterly roots of his body of work.

Mel Bochner Voices

Rashid Johnson

Claire Gilman

Universally accessible and employing common visual tropes such as the monochrome and the grid, Johnson's work is also self-referential, making specific allusion to his upbringing in Chicago and the Afro-centric values of his parents. In Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men, the artist creates a site-specific installation in the Drawing Room gallery. The core of the exhibition is a new series of black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits that Johnson calls his “anxious men.” Executed by digging into a waxy surface, they enact a kind of drawing through erasure and represent the first time Johnson has worked figuratively outside of photography or film, and on such a small scale. Whereas Johnson’s previous work has taken a more cerebral approach to questions of race and political identity, the drawn portraits confront the viewer with a visceral immediacy. The portraits are set within a multi-sensory environment that includes wallpaper featuring a photograph of the artist’s father from the year Johnson was born, and an audio sound track comprised of Melvin Van Peebles’s “Love, That’s America,” a song that originally appeared in Peebles’s 1970 film Watermelon Manand that was recently pressed into service by the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this way, the exhibition, documented in this volume, creates an immersive space that implicates not only the artist but also the viewer in its interrogation of selfhood and identity.

Maya Blake

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