Mel Bochner (American, 1940–2025)
Amazing
Monoprint (oil, collage, engraving & embossment)
30 × 22 in (76.2 × 55.9 cm)
Few artists have explored the expressive power of language as profoundly as Mel Bochner. Since the 1960s, Bochner has challenged the boundaries between words and images, transforming language itself into his primary artistic subject. His celebrated text works demonstrate that words carry not only literal meaning, but also emotion, rhythm, humor, contradiction, and physical presence. Amazing belongs squarely within this iconic body of work, taking a single, familiar word and elevating it into a richly layered visual experience. The emphatic declaration—rendered in thick, tactile pigment that drips and pools across vibrant bands of color—captures the tension between language as communication and language as material. As with his renowned Blah Blah Blah, Oh Well, and Win! compositions, the word becomes both the message and the medium, inviting viewers to reconsider how meaning shifts through repetition, scale, color, and gesture.
Unlike Bochner’s editioned prints, Amazing is a unique monoprint produced in collaboration with Two Palms, one of America’s most respected fine art print workshops. The term “monoprint” can be misleading, as this is not a reproduction or a multiple. Rather, it is a one-of-a-kind work created through an intensive, hands-on process in which Bochner himself manipulated the viscous oil-based pigments directly onto the printing matrix, making artistic decisions that could never be identically repeated. The resulting impression exists as a singular object—there is no edition, no duplicate, and no second example. Combining the immediacy and physicality of painting with the technical sophistication of printmaking, Amazing occupies a special place within Bochner’s oeuvre, offering collectors the rarity of a unique, artist-created work that embodies the conceptual rigor, wit, and material richness for which he is internationally celebrated.
PRICE: on request
