On kawara born

Summary of On Kawara

On Kawara is one of the most enigmatic of modern artists. Like his forerunner Marcel Duchamp, Kawara retreated from the art scene, avoiding his own exhibition openings and declining to be interviewed, so that his public persona came to be defined solely through his work. But that work itself seems - at first sight - to offer little more reward to biographers. Instead, it methodically and meticulously documents the trajectory of On's life, without apparent ornament, an art based on ideas rather than aesthetics which sits firmly within the tradition of Conceptual art associated with Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. However, the extraordinary duration of Kawara's process-based projects - one of which, his date-painting series Today, lasted almost fifty years, producing almost 3,000 individual works - and the meditative consistency with which he applied himself to his tasks, sets his oeuvre apart, and links his work to his background in Buddhist and Shinto ph

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As part of the performance program, the HALLEFÜRKUNST Steiermark is pleased to be the first institution in Austria to present the work One Million Years by the artist On Kawara in a performative reading. This will take place on two days, Friday, February 28, and Saturday, March 1, from 6 to 10 p.m. and is open to the public.

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The Japanese-born artist On Kawara (1932 – 2014) dedicated his work to the phenomenon of time and how we experience it. His idiosyncratic work has been a central contribution to conceptual art and makes him one of the main proponents of this movement. He is perhaps best known for his Today series, also known as Date Paintings. A Date Painting is a monochrome canvas in red, blue or grey on which the date of creation is inscribed in white. The date is written in the language and convention of the place where Kawara painted the picture. The pictures were created in hours of painstaking w

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On Kawara

Japanese artist (1932–2014)

On Kawara (河原温, Kawara On, månad 24, 1932 – July 10, 2014) was a Japanese conceptual artist who lived in SoHo, New York City, from 1965 until his death. He took part in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.

Early life

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Kawara was born in Kariya, Japan on December 24, 1932. After graduating from Kariya High School in 1951, Kawara moved to Tokyo. Kawara went to Mexico in 1959, where his father was the director of an engineering company. He stayed three years, painting, attending art school and exploring the country.^[2] From 1962 to 1964 he moved back and forth between New York and Paris.^[3] He travelled through Europe before settling in 1965 in New York City, where he was an intermittent resident until his death.^[4]

Work

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Kawara belonged to a broadly international generation of conceptual artists that began to emerge in the mid-1960s, stripping art of per