Mel Bochner's work examines how painting and language are constructed and understood. The artist, coming of age during the radical changes in the late 1960s, made language a subject of his work just as the medium of painting was slowly losing its preeminent position in the visual arts. Bochner's work explores the relationships between the word and the image in an effort to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world.