Bochner Boetti Fontana

As a student, Mel Bochner was profoundly influenced by the works of the Italian masters Lucio Fontana and Alighiero Boetti. Decades later, the American artist has curated “Bochner Boetti Fontana,” an exhibition that considers the formal, conceptual, and procedural links between the three men and their works.

With Fontana, Bochner shared matter and a conceptual rigor; with Boetti, he shared a love of languages, numbers, and systems. Boetti’s Tavola pitagorica (1990), for example, is a meditation on the Pythagorean Theorem with a personal touch—the name of his wife, Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti, is embedded in the scramble of letters.

“Bochner Boetti Fontana” marks the first showing of an American at Magazzino, the Hudson Valley museum of postwar and contemporary Italian art. As a young artist, Bochner initially found more interest in his work in Italy than in the states. As an established artist, he returns the favor in bringing Boetti and Fontana to us.