Mel Bochner — Mirror Works For Sale

Mel Bochner's Mirror Works turn one of his oldest preoccupations — the tension between language and its material support — into etched and silvered glass. First exhibited at Krakow Witkin Gallery in 2019, the series is made using laser engraving and hand-applied silver nitrate on laminated glass, so that each phrase is set directly into a mirrored surface rather than printed or painted onto it. Texts include Everybody Is Full Of Shit, Are You Out Of Your Fucking Mind?, and If The Color Changes..., each produced in an edition of 12 measuring 25 x 35 x 1.25 inches.

Because the words are cut into a reflective ground, viewers inevitably see their own faces behind the text as they read it, literalising the series' interest in vanity, self-scrutiny and the act of looking. If The Color Changes... takes this further, presenting a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour in both its original German and an English translation, layered across the glass so that meaning has to be worked for rather than simply received.

The Mirror Works revisit phrases and preoccupations that recur throughout Bochner's career, applying his earlier painted and printed language to etched and silvered glass for the first time. In doing so they extend his decades-long inquiry — begun with his pioneering 1966 conceptual exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art — into how language behaves differently depending on the surface that carries it.