Mel Bochner — Other Editions For Sale

Other Editions gathers a selection of Mel Bochner's numbered print editions from across his Thesaurus painting practice, including works titled Obscene, Braggart, Language Is Not Transparent, Liar and Scoundrel. Each print takes a single word or short phrase and surrounds it with a cascading list of synonyms, a method Bochner developed from his 1966 use of Roget's Thesaurus as source material and returned to throughout the final decades of his career.

Many of these editions were produced as silkscreens, often published in collaboration with print studios such as Two Palms Press, translating Bochner's densely layered painted compositions into the flatter, more graphic register of the printed page while preserving the bold block-capital typography and saturated colour fields that define the series. As with his paintings, the words in each print escalate in tone — moving from polite synonyms toward blunter or more provocative language — turning what looks at first like a simple exercise in vocabulary into a study of how meaning shifts with register, repetition and context.

Together, these editions extend Bochner's standing as one of the foundational figures of Conceptual Art into a more widely accessible print format, allowing collectors to acquire works from a practice built on the premise that the idea behind a piece — not its physical execution alone — is what gives it lasting significance.