[6] In high school, he won recognition for his talent from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and studied with Joseph Fitzpatrick.
[4] After graduation, Bochner lived in San Francisco, traveled around Mexico, and eventually landed in Chicago, where he audited philosophy classes at Northwestern University.
For a 1998 work titled Event Horizon, for example, he arranged prestretched canvases of various sizes along a wall, each marked with a horizontal line and a number denoting its width in inches.
He taught at Yale University as a teacher's assistant in 1979, as senior critic in painting and printmaking, and in 2001 as adjunct professor.
[4] His work is represented by Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco); Peter Freeman Inc. (New York and Paris); and Marc Selwyn Fine Art (Los Angeles).
King wrote the essay "Building a Language," and Charles Stuckey contributed the piece "An Interview with Mel Bochner."
[14]In 1995, Yale University Art Gallery organized a retrospective, Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966–1973.
For his solo show at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2000, Bochner layered German and English versions of a text from Wittgenstein.
In her review of the show for Art in America, Eleanor Heartney wrote: In Bochner's work, perception constantly trumps idea, reaffirming the artist's belief that the sensuous is an essential element in even the most conceptual art.In 2004, Bochner's work was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and was part of OpenSystems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 at London's Tate Modern in 2005.
[15] In 2011, a retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.[16] A survey of Mel Bochner's work - entitled Mel Bochner: If the Colour Changes, was held at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto during 2012.
[17] The exhibition is accompanied by a first comprehensive monograph, published by Ridinghouse, with essays by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Briony Fer, João Fernandes, Mark Godfrey, and Ulrich Wilmes.