PERMANENT INSTALLATIONS

Twelve Months, 1993
Château d’Oiron
10 Rue du Château, 79100
Plaine-et-Vallées, France

Date Paintings of the 20th Century
Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY 12508 USA

Moon Landing
Glenstone Museum
12100 Glen Road
Potomac, MD 20854 USA

Date Paintings of the 20th Century
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst
Domstraße 10, 60311
Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Permanent Installations

For just under a half a century, On Kawara’s artistic practice was dominated by the creation of a long-running sequence of meticulously crafted paintings, collectively called Today. Each work represents nothing more than the day on which it was executed, the date inscribed in white letters and numerals on a monochrome canvas in the language and convention of the country Kawara was in at the time (except in countries that use a non-Roman alphabet, in which case the artist used Esperanto). The nearly three thousand Date Paintings, as they are commonly known, range in color from muted gray to blue to bright red and in size from 8 x 10 inches to 61 x 89 inches. A Date Painting was begun and finished on the same day that it records; if a painting was not satisfactorily completed by midnight, it was destroyed. Occasionally Kawara produced two, sometimes three paintings on a given day.

While every Date Painting is an autonomous work, over the years, Kawara selected Date Paintings to be shown together in various combinations. His choices simultaneously highlight the significance and insignificance of any singular day, and often reflect the element of time within his oeuvre: from days of the week (Sundays) to larger spans of time (Twelve Months; Ten Years; Date Paintings of the 20th Century). Others call attention to language (48 Years in 8 Languages), or to place, both in where the works had been created (Five Continents) and in consideration of how they might be exhibited (Corner Piece). Still others bear titles that seem to reveal something more personal: events taking place at the time of painting (Moon Landing, three large-format works made in July 1969 during the NASA Apollo 11 lunar landing mission), for example, or the meaning that Kawara might have taken from his practice (Everyday Meditation, 97 paintings produced each day over the course of three months in 1970), or from the finished works (Field of Consciousness, ten paintings from the first ten years of the 21st century; and Pure Consciousness, a traveling installation of seven paintings from the first week of January 1997).

In total, Kawara chose more than thirty such sets, which today are distributed in both public and private collections at a number of sites throughout the world. Of these, four groupings are exhibited in permanent installations on public view at: the Château d’Oiron in Plaine-et-Vallées, France; Dia Beacon in Beacon, New York, U.S.A.; Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, U.S.A.; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany.