On Kawara

June 19, 1967 by On Kawara

On Kawara ( Japanese 河 原 温 , Kawara On ; born January 2, 1933 in Kariya in Aichi , † July 10, 2014 in New York City ) was a Japanese visual artist and representative of conceptual art . He lived in New York City.

On Kawara reduced his conceptual work to a system that allowed him to transform the temporal duration and spatial stay of his life into art. The main themes of his art are time and temporality. On Kawara has been creating a work of contemporary art that is extreme in its reduction since the 1960s . The artist, who is constantly on the move, neither gave interviews nor had himself photographed and never appeared at the vernissages of his exhibitions. Since the 1960s, his work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. His work can be found in numerous public and private collections.

Artistic work

Today Series

On January 4, 1966 On Kawara created his first Date Painting and started a continuous, conceptually unlimited series Today , which comprises over 2000 individual images.

A monochrome, sometimes red or blue, but in most cases dark background, bears the date of the day on which the respective picture was taken, painted in white acrylic paint on canvas. The date format corresponds to that of the country in which On Kawara created the respective picture. If the national language does not use Latin characters, the date format is in Esperanto . The respective date painting has one of eight fixed formats (from 20.5 × 25.5 cm to 155 × 226 cm; 5 cm deep). The images were always created in landscape format.

Each date painting is in a specially made, exactly matching box, which at least in the early years also contained the front page of a newspaper on the day it was created. As a final rule, On Kawara stipulated that a picture that could not be completed by him on the day whose date it represents should be destroyed.

Like many other works by Kawara, the Date Paintings deal primarily with the passage of time. Kawara explained that his pictures are "a kind of meditation, an exercise that is useful for losing oneself."

I READ, I WENT, I MET

The work I READ is considered a parallel work to the Today Series . He also started this in 1966. I READ is a series of notebooks containing newspaper clippings from the days on which a date painting was done. The newspaper clippings come from a newspaper from the country in which the respective picture was taken. The date of the respective day is stamped on it.

The work I WENT is also a series of notebooks in which On Kawara noted his daily journeys with red ink on map sections.

In I MET , On Kawara typed the names of people he knew and met within a period of 24 hours on pieces of paper marked with the date of the respective day.

I GOT UP AT, I AM STILL ALIVE

From 1968 to 1979 On Kawara sent the same postcard every day to two different people under the title I GOT UP AT . This map always represented the place where the artist was currently located. The card was marked with the date, the word I GOT UP AT and the exact time of getting up printed on it.

From 1970 to 1979 On Kawara worked on the series I AM STILL ALIVE , for which he periodically sent telegrams to various people he knew (mostly friends and colleagues) with the following message: “I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA ”.

This work was preceded by three telegrams from 1969, which he sent to the exhibition curator Michel Claura on the occasion of the exhibition 18 Paris IV.70 . They had the following content: "6 Dec 1969 - I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE DONT WORRY", "8 Dec 1969 - I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE WORRY" and "11 Dec 1969 - I AM GOING TO SLEEP FORGET IT".

More work

On Kawara has also created other works such as One Million Years - Past (1969) and One Million Years - Future (1981), Code (1965) or Questions: 'Give Sentences ...' (1964).

reception

“When we look at an artist's retrospective in this country, we notice how he matures or ages in his work over many years. In the case of On Kawara it is the other way round: The images over 25 years, which remain the same in form but only change in date, confront us with aging. In a museum that combines so many styles, tendencies and languages, this consistent, timeless style, which condenses events and emotions in a single date, is of decisive, meditative importance. Time stands still somehow in these pictures, in which one reads one's own story more than perceives the story of the pictures. "

- Jean-Christophe Ammann

Exhibitions and participation in exhibitions (among others)

• Portikus , Frankfurt am Main: Again and Against , 1969
• Tokyo Biennale (1970), Tokyo
• Kyoto Biennale (1976), Kyoto
• Biennale di Venezia (1976), Venice
• Documenta 6 (1977), Kassel
• On Kawara: continuity / discontinuity 1963–1979 (1980), Stockholm, Essen, Eindhoven, Osaka
• Documenta 7 (1982), Kassel
• Date paintings in 89 cities (1991–1993), Rotterdam, Hamburg, Boston, San Francisco
• On Kawara: One Thousand Days One Million Years (1993), New York
• Whole and Parts 1964-1995 (1996), Villeurbanne, Lille, Turin, Barcelona, ​​Tokyo
• 2000/01: On Kawara - Horinzontality / Verticality , Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich
• Documenta 11 (2002), Kassel
• Museum of Modern Art (MMK), Frankfurt am Main (2010), exhibition: Radical Conceptual
• On Kawara — Silence , Guggenheim Museum , New York City , February 6 to May 3, 2015

literature

• Baba, Shunkich: On Kawara, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, 1983
• Cooke, Lynne: On Kawara. One Thousand Days One Million Years, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1993
• Kawara, On / Wilmes, Ulrich: Horizontality / Verticality. Walter König Verlag, Cologne, 2002, ISBN 978-3-88375-447-5
• Granath, Olle: On Kawara: continuity / discontinuity 1963–1979, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1980
• Denizot, Rene: On Kawara, Art Press, Paris, October 1990
• Kawara, On: On Kawara. Phaidon, Berlin, New York, 2002, ISBN 978-0-7148-4104-5
• Toshiaki, Minemura: On Kawara: Whole and Parts 1964–1995, Les Presses du réel, Dijon, 1996

Web links

• Literature by and about On Kawara in the catalog of the German National Library
• Materials by and about On Kawara in the documenta archive
• On Kawara on kunstaspekte.de
• Exhibition One Thousand Days One Million Years, Dia Art Foundation New York
• Exhibition On Kawara Again and Again, Portikus, Frankfurt / Main
• Roberta Smith : On Kawara, Conceptual Artist Who Found Elegance in Every Day, Dies at 81. Obituary in The New York Times, July 15, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Other sources give as the date of birth December 24, 1932. - Kawara, On: 100 Years Calendar (18,864 Days). In: Kawara, On: On Kawara. Phaidon, New York / London, 2002, pp. 84/85
2. ↑ Died On Kawara - Master of Time. Obituary in the Tagesspiegel of July 11, 2014 (accessed on July 11, 2014).
3. ^ Watkins Jonathan: Where 'I Don't Know' Is the Right Answer. In: Kawara, On: On Kawara. Phaidon, New York / London, 2002
4. ↑ Nico Israel: On Kawara. (No longer available online.) In: Artforum. January 1, 2005, archived from the original on July 14, 2014 ; Retrieved on August 9, 2012 (English, via HighBeam Research): "The" Today "paintings may be, as Kawara himself has suggested, a form of" meditation, a routine conducive to the loss of ego "and may indeed alert us to "fundamental truths" about the passing of time " 
5. ↑ Patrick Conley: Jean-Christophe Ammann. Questions to the director of the Museum of Modern Art . In: ART Position , Vol. 1, Issue 3 (September 1989), pp. 7 to 9.
6. ↑ Irene Netta, Ursula Keltz: 75 years of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich . Ed .: Helmut Friedel. Self-published by the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-88645-157-7 , p. 247 .
7. ↑ - ( Memento from January 12, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
8. ↑ Peter Richter: A life, coded for the public. Against the pitfalls of the sublime: The Guggenheim Museum in New York has managed to hold an astonishing retrospective for On Kawara. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 34, February 11, 2015, ISSN  0174-4917 , p. 11.