An early practitioner of Conceptual art, Mel Bochner engaged with language, mathematics, systems, and seriality over his seven-decade career. He first installed Measurement Room at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich, Germany, in May 1969, where he measured and recorded the dimensions of one of the gallery’s rooms. Bochner marked the lengths and widths of architectural elements such as walls, doorways, and windows with strips of black tape and notated all the measurements. The installation was part of a series in which the artist used everyday materials to demarcate space, highlighting the relationship between architecture and viewer. “The viewer ‘inhabits’ a conceptual space which has been superimposed over an existing physical space,” Bochner explained. “Perceptually the room becomes an object in reverse, a negative of itself, a place turned inside-out.”
The current installation is in memoriam of Bochner, who died this year at the age of eighty-four.
Organized by Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints and Department of Curatorial Affairs.
