For On Kawara, It Was a Productive Day

Midnight was the deadline for On Kawara. If the Japanese artist failed to complete his painting—a calendar date in a white sans serif typeface on a monochromatic background—he would destroy the canvas.

Kawara didn’t always finish by the time the clock struck 12, but many times he did. Impressively, in 1970, he completed a painting every day over a three-month stretch.

DEC. 4, 1991 (1991) was one of almost 3,000 paintings produced by Kawara in a series that came to be known as the ‘Date Paintings’ (1966–2012). From now through to 25 January, David Zwirner on Grafton Street hosts an exhibition of 24 works from the series.

For each painting’, Kawara fabricated a cardboard storage box, many of which he would line with a cutting from a local newspaper. It’s here that you see the extent of his travels. He frequently worked in hotel rooms, and the result was a series of work produced in more than 112 cities worldwide. At David Zwirner, the painting 3 AOÛT 2006 (2006) is accompanied by a weather report from a hot August day in France, While 30 APR. 68 (1968) is presented with a snippet from the sports section of one of Mexico City’s longest-running daily papers.

On 4 December 1991, Kawara was in New York—a city he would make his base from 1965, becoming a key figure in the city’s nascent Conceptual art scene.

Stuck to the box that houses DEC. 4, 1991 is a double-page spread of The New York Times, where viewers can read a report of salmon spawning in Connecticut’s Salmon River, concerns of declining attendance to National Hockey League arenas and coverage of the AIDS epidemic.

Running concurrently to On Kawara: Date Paintings is a presentation in David Zwirner’s Paris gallery of four rarely seen paintings made by Kawara in Tokyo in 1955 and 1956.

Main image: On Kawara, DEC. 4, 1991 (1991). Acrylic on canvas. 66.0 x 91.4 cm. Courtesy the Artist and David Zwirner.