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.

Mel Bochner, born in 1940, is one of the leading figures in the development of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bochner was part of a new generation of artists—which included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson—who were looking at ways of breaking with abstract expressionism and traditional compositional devices. Bochner pioneered the use of language as a subject for the visual arts—leading Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe the artist's 1966 Working Drawings as "probably the first truly conceptual exhibition."

Bochner has worked with Two Palms since 1994.