BIRMINGHAM.- The Birmingham Museum of Art opens the exhibit Mel Bochner: Drawing from Four Decades through September 30. Born in 1940, Bochner is considered one of the founding figures of conceptual art and is credited with prioritizing language, serial systems, and conceptual ideas over the physical object in his art. That drawing was at the center of Bochner's art at the beginning of his career has been acknowledged by several national exhibitions highlighting works on paper created between 1966 and 1973.

Less well known, however, is that drawing has remained key to Bochner's art over subsequent decades, during which he both expanded upon his early work and extended his conceptual, visual, and emotional reach. The current exhibition includes more than thirty works that suggest the density of Bochner's approach and the role drawing has played both in the creation of unique works and as a methodology essential to installation, painting, and sculpture.

Mel Bochner is an American Conceptual artist and writer on art born in Pittsburgh in 1940. He took a BFA degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology 1962 (major in painting; minor in philosophy). Has taught aesthetics, art history and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts, New York, since 1965. He became deeply involved in 'moving away from the tangible "Object of Art" into a more conceptual notion of art as a procedure'. The artist made number drawings and photograph pieces 1965-7 based on sets of simple rules involving permutation, reversal, rotation and progression. His first one-man exhibition was at the Visual Arts Gallery at the School of Visual Arts 1966. From 1967-8 he engaged in the notation of measurement, e.g. marking the dimensions of a room straight onto the room's walls. He also began in 1969 a series titled 'Theory' and including 'The Theory of Boundaries', 'Ten Aspects of the Theory of Measurement', etc. He has made several films including Walking a Straight Line through Grand Central Station 1965.