
On Kawara -- Silence
Description
On Kawara was born in Japan in 1933. During the 1950s he was a prominent member of the postwar Tokyo avant-garde, producing figurative work in a late-Surrealist style. Kawara left Japan in 1959, traveling to Mexico City, Paris and New York, where he settled in 1964. By 1966 he had devoted his work solely to the schematic representation of time and place through calendars, maps, lists, postcards and telegrams. Kawara's primary body of work, which occupied him until his death in 2014, is the Today series, a sequence of paintings produced according to strict protocols of size, color and technique. An incessant traveler, the artist produced Date Paintings in 136 cities and various languages.
Product Details
Publisher | Guggenheim Museum |
Publish Date | March 24, 2015 |
Pages | 264 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780892075195 |
Dimensions | 9.9 X 13.0 X 1.6 inches | 4.5 pounds |
Reviews
On Kawara: Silence, a quietly rapturous exhibition that opens this weekend at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, showcases the career of an artist who used minimal means for maximum effect. The artist died last year while preparing this show - instantly transforming his sequential paintings from an open-ended feat to a closed structure - and I had expected, when the show was announced, that Kawara's insistently spare art would feel funereal in the Guggenheim's grand spiral. I was wrong; it is a joy. Like each of his date paintings, the exhibition is somehow awesome and modest at once. It reckons with the grandest questions of being and time, and yet feels lived in, comfortable, and winningly unpretentious. It brings cosmic time down to human scale, and then makes an individual life feel as broad as the universe.--Jason Farago "The Guardian"
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