Blah Blah Blah to Star

Auctionata’s upcoming sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art is jam-packed with big names. Works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Joan Miró, David Hockney and others decorate the catalogue pages; suffice to say that this auction includes many of the most influential and progressive artists from the past 65 years.

More than holding it’s own with the celebrated names above is Lot 48, Mel Bochner’s Blah Blah Blah. This 2014 monoprint with collage, engraving and embossment is an iconic work, containing the artist’s most well known text.

Bochner, whose paintings were recently the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum, has always been interested in systems involving language or numbers, and incorporates these into brightly colored paintings with provocative language taken from popular culture.

“Many artists have used the painted word,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian,  “but Bochner seems to use words to tell us something about the mentality, and the plight, of paintings themselves. They declare what they are and how they feel.”

One of the founders of the Conceptual Art Movement, Mel Bochner had his first exhibition in 1966 at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In the 1970 he shifted to painting and used unconventional materials. Mel has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and his work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Work by Andy Warhol (left) and Kiki Smith should find happy homes this Saturday

Auctionata’s Post-War & Contemporary Art auction is set down for Saturday, February 21, with kick-off at 12:00pm. All the big guns behind major movements – Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and graffiti-inspired Contemporary Art are on show, presenting a brilliant opportunity to own a piece of genuine art history.