On Kawara found his way to art as a self-taught artist
On Kawara was born on 2nd January 1933 in Kariya, Aichi Prefecture in Japan. After graduating from high school, he moved to Tokyo in 1951 and then to Mexico in 1959, where his father ran an engineering company. Kawara stayed in Mexico for three years, attended an art school, painted, and got to know the country and its people. Fine art was important to On Kawara from an early age, but he never received a comprehensive artistic education, acquiring his skills largely as an autodidact. In the 1950s, his masterfully executed pencil drawings offered him a way of coming to terms with the terrible experiences of war in connection with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between 1962 and 1964, Kawara lived alternately in New York and Paris; during this time, he produced around 200 drawings, which became known under the title Paris-New York Drawings and, with their stripe and grid motifs, are reminiscent of the works of the American minimalist painter Agnes Martin.
The Date Paintings became his life's work
On Kawara created his first Date Painting on 4th January 1966, laying the foundation for an artistic project that would occupy and define him for many decades. It was the first work in a long series that became world-famous under the name Today. When the painter died, he left behind over 2,000 of these Date Paintings, which simply consist of a date in white lettering against a monochrome background. The language and formatting of the date always correspond to the customs of the country in which the painting was created. Each picture was created within one day - if the artist was unable to complete his work on time for certain reasons, he completely destroyed the picture he had started and began a new work on another day. Parallel to his Today series, he created the work I READ, which in a way represents a kind of documentation of the Date Paintings: from the days on which he painted a Date Painting, Kawara collected newspaper reports as accompanying material, whereby here too it always had to be a newspaper that had been published in the country in which the artist had also painted the corresponding date.
Postcards, telegrams and calendars
On Kawara began another major project in 1968, which he continued until 1979: under the title I GOT UP AT, he sent two identical postcards to two different people every day. Each card provided information about the artist's current location, as well as the date, the inscription ‘I GOT UP AT’ and a precise indication of when Kawara had got up that morning. In 1970, Kawara began a similar project called I AM STILL ALIVE, for which he sent telegrams at certain intervals to people he knew, containing only one message: ‘I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA’. Other well-known series of works by Kawara were One Million Years and Pure Consciousness, which also dealt with the theme of time. Kawara also created centenary calendars, for which he chose his own date of birth as the starting point. On the art market, works by On Kawara fetch prices in the millions: in 2007, one of his Date Paintings fetched 1.8 million dollars at an auction, and in 2014 another painting was sold for almost 2 million dollars.
On Kawara died on 10th July 2014 in New York City.
On Kawara - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
