ON KAWARA

Early Works David Zwirner 21 November 2024–25 January 2025 Paris

Press Release

David Zwirner is pleased to announce two exhibitions of paintings by On Kawara (1932–2014), which will be on view concurrently at the gallery’s Paris and London locations. The presentations are organized in collaboration with the One Million Years Foundation, established by the artist during his lifetime to ensure the legacy of his work. These exhibitions are the gallery’s first presentations of Kawara’s work since his death in 2014 and offer a rare opportunity to view two significant bodies of paintings by the artist.

The presentation in Paris will feature four rarely seen early paintings made by Kawara in Tokyo in 1955 and 1956. For the young artist, an active and vocal participant in the city’s avant-garde art community, painting provided an avenue for thinking through the palpable collective trauma that loomed over his native country in the postwar years. These enigmatic and highly accomplished works, which number among the earliest known instances of an artist working on shaped canvases, simultaneously seem to collapse and expand space, drastically unmooring the viewer’s understanding of perspective and testifying to the experience of a particular time and place.

About the Artist

For over five decades, On Kawara created paintings, drawings, books, and recordings that examined chronological time and its function as a measure of human existence. His artistic practice was characterized by its meditative approach to concepts of time, space, and consciousness. He began making his now signature date paintings (known as the Today series) on January 4, 1966 in New York City and continued to produce them in different parts of the world up until his death.

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GROUP EXHIBITION Au 108 rue Vieille du Temple David Zwirner From 8 September 2026 Paris

About the Gallery

Since opening its doors in 1993, David Zwirner has been home to innovative, singular, and pioneering exhibitions across a variety of media and genres. The gallery has helped foster the careers of some of the most influential artists working today, and has maintained long-term representation of a wide-ranging, international group of artists and estates. Based in New York with spaces in Chelsea and the Upper East Side, David Zwirner expanded to Europe in 2012 with a gallery in an eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse in London’s Mayfair district, and opened its first gallery in Asia in January 2018 in Central Hong Kong.

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Address

108 rue Vieille du Temple
Paris
France

Opening Hours

Tuesday – Saturday
10am – 6pm

David Zwirner

108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, France

+33 (0)1 85 09 43 21
http://www.davidzwirner.com

Opening hours

Tuesday – Saturday
10am – 6pm

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ON KAWARA

Installation Views

Also Exhibiting