On Kawara was born on December 24, 1932 in Kariya, Aichi, Japan, in an intellectual family environment. He was greatly affected by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred when he was a teenager, and which left him deeply unsettled, questioning the moral values underpinning human society.
After graduating from Kariya High School in 1951, Kawara relocated to Tokyo, where he studyed European philosophy and political and psychoanalytic theory. For a short period during 1961 - 1962, Kawara attended the art department of Mexico City University.
In Tokyo Kawara quickly acquired a reputation within the Japanese avant-garde art scene, attaching himself to the Avant-Garde Art Association established by Kikuji Yamashita and other painters of a broadly leftist, Social Realist persuasion. Art historian Jung-Ah Woo writes that at this time, Kawara stood for a "new generation of social realism", "determined to confront the reality of Japan's postwar society with a vision unclouded by the older generation's nostalgia for the prewar past." But Kawara's own 1950s work, such as "Thinking Man", eschews obvious social commentary for a more elliptical, surrealist style, though still clearly imbued with political content. Just as he was gaining a cult-like following in Tokyo, Kawara became frustrated with the art scene there. He left Japan and set out on the road towards biographical erasure which would eventually result in his refusal to write about his work or life.
In 1959, Kawara moved with his father to Mexico City, where he remained for four years, using it as a base to practice modern art - indeed, some writers have commented on the affinity between Kawara's early painting style and that of Mexican contemporaries such as David Alfaro Siqueiros - and to travel around the country. In 1962, Kawara moved from Mexico City to New York, where he remained for eight months before travelling to Paris. From Paris he travelled to Toledo in Spain, making a pilgrimage to view the Altamira cava paintings. In 1964, back in Paris, he began a series of drawings that he continued after returning to New York in the autumn of that year. The "1964 Paris - New York" series abandons the figurative representation of his 1950s work for combinations of obscure diagrams and symbols, sketches of imagined sculptural environments and installations, and brief, obscure, written messages. Many of these techniques are shared in common with Minimalist painting and Conceptual art.
Kawara settled in New York in 1964 - just as the Conceptual art movement was taking off in the city - and began to create the kinds of works that would characterize his mature period. Some of his early-to-mid 1960s work contained sequential arrangements of shapes suggestive of a language or code system. Others were monochrome paintings featuring single phrases or words. Although Kawara chose to destroy most of his paintings from this period, these works did convince him of the need to incorporate the written word into his art. The most significant of Kawara's surviving works from this time is "Title", whose explicit political content - related to the Vietnam War - foreshadows a consistent feature of his later work: its framing with reference to contemporary social and political events.
By the late 1960s, Kawara had completely abandoned public discussion of his practice. This has made documenting his life and work from that point onwards very difficult, with art historians forced to piece together a biography from the documentary records included in Kawara's work. As a Conceptual artist, however, Kawara was as concerned with documenting the making of his art as with its final form and appearance, so more of this evidence is furnished than might be expected.
On January 4, 1966, Kawara began the "Today" series, a project which he would continue for almost fifty years. The so-called "Date Paintings" that made up the series consist of square canvases of varying sizes, on which the date of the painting was written in sans serif font, with various compositional features altering depending on the date, and on the artist's location. Undertaken with a level of precision and care belied by the simplicity of their final appearance, the "Today" project established the modus operandi; various projects similarly concerned with 'marking time' were established over the next few years. The "Today" project also spawned a set of associated, ritualistic practices that became almost as creatively significant as the composition of the paintings themselves. Each painting, for example, was stored in a box lined with newspaper from the day of composition, and annual journals were produced documenting various facts about the composition of the "Date Paintings." Because of the isolation in which Kawara worked from the late 1960s onwards, his biography from that point onwards is identical with the record of his artistic activity from that point. On Kawara died in 2014.
Kawara is best known for the “date paintings” in his "Today" series that he had been creatinf since 1966, each of which conforms to one of eight predetermined sizes and features a date in hand-lettered typography painted over a monochromatic background. In 2007, one of Kawaras "Date Paintings" was sold for $1.8 million at Christie's New York. Another date painting, "May 1, 1987", set an auction record for Kawara when it sold for almost $4.2 million at Christie's New York in 2014.
I Am Still Alive (Four Telegrams)
One Million Years
19 February 2006 (from Today Series)
Dec. 12, 1979 (from Today Series, Wednesday)
Nov. 26 1966 (from Today Series, No. 217)
Aug. 3 2005
I Got Up at 9.47 A.M. (Feb. 12 1978)
One Thing, 1965, Viet-Nam
June 19, 1967 (from Today Series, No. 108)
Oct. 23, 1989 (from Today Series, Monday)
Oct. 31, 1973 (from Today Series, Tuesday)
Dec. 17, 1979 (from Today Series, Monday)
I Am Still Alive (18.05.1973)
4 Mars 1973 (from Today Series)
Mar. 5, 2000
Jan. 4 1966 (from Today Series)
Kawara's art was based on ideas rather than aesthetics which sits firmly within the tradition of Conceptual art. On Kawara's artworks often present the viewer with a simple, linguistic message about the artist's life.
