On Kawara ― Silence - Tapa dura

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 " Like a true Conceptualist, Mr. Kawara stuck to the facts and also transcended them, endowing them with a resonant appeal and a sense of form as fine-tuned as any Minimalist sculptor's. His art helped shape Conceptualism's love of uninflected information. It fused the movement's basic duality of image plus text into an instantly legible unit before it actually existed. It also bridged the gap between the modernist monochrome as devotional object and the Duchampian ready-made.--Roberta Smith "The New York Times "

Given his recourse to language, photography and systems of information, On Kawara is often described as a key figure in the history of Conceptual art. Yet his work stands apart in its devotion to painting and its existential reach. On Kawara – Silence is published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Kawara’s post-1964 work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Like the exhibition itself, the structure of the book was devised in close collaboration with the late artist and contains essays by leading scholars and critics in various fields, including art history, literary studies and cultural anthropology. It also includes substantial, authoritative descriptions of every category of his production – the first time such comprehensive information has appeared in print. Richly illustrated, On Kawara – Silence reproduces many examples of the Date Paintings (Today), calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years), postcards (I Got Up), telegrams (I Am Still Alive), news cuttings (I Read), maps (I Went), and lists (I Met) that comprised the artist’s practice beginning in the mid-1960s. Among other groups of works, the book includes images of the ninety-seven Date Paintings (accompanied by their newspaperlined storage boxes) that Kawara produced during a three-month run of daily painting in 1970. The catalogue also contains reproductions of paintings and drawings produced in Paris and New York in the years that precede the works for which Kawara is best known, as well as rare images of materials related to his working process