On Kawara

Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1978

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original work. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light. Box: There are three tears to the box; one in the top left and another in the lower right corner of the lid and a further tear in the lower left corner of the bottom of the box. The card is coming away from the internal brown tape in the lower left corner of the bottom of the box. There is some light fading to the newspaper.
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' Like tumbled dice, the Date Paintings are consumed paintings of time. They are dated products of a present that has been deposited, defined, fixed, in the body and in painting.'

René Denizot, 'On Kawara' in: Writings on the Collection: Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Frankfurt 1991, p. 29

 

A powerful and dramatic example of On Kawara's iconic Today series, Mar.17,1972 is immaculate in a monochromatic, formal simplicity which defines the artist's oeuvre. These paintings depict not only a date but significantly their own date, subverting the traditional formula of dating a painting by making it the sole embodiment of the paintings imagery.

The present work, created through On Kawara's painstaking and meditative process, exhibits an intensity of colour that is not pure black or pure white, but subtle tones of blue, grey and brown, which resonate from the canvas. Despite this attention to craftsmanship, the artist operates within strict parameters and any work that fails to be completed by midnight of that day is destroyed.

 

While each work holds the same figurative information, they differ in typographical terms according to the conventions of the country in which they were produced – a small clue to the movements and life of this reclusive artist. Once complete, the work is then stored in a hand-made box lined with a newspaper clipping of the same date, further identifying the work with a specific yet temporal reality.

 

This series is the only body of work from the artist's broad conceptual oeuvre that conforms to the traditional methods of painting. The exacting methods surrounding the creation of each dated work mirror the artist's obsessions with repetition and the daily consumption of the finite time allotted to each of us in life. In this way a parallel can be drawn with Claude Monet's creation of the Haystack series of 1890, during which he repeated the same observed subject to depict the sequential changes of light. Eighty years later, On Kawara has created an object that simultaneously acknowledges this historical canon of representation, but powerfully asserts its own autonomous presence in time and history.