Collection: On Kawara

On Kawara (1932–2014) was a Japanese conceptual artist whose practice, spanning five decades, constituted one of the most rigorous investigations of time, language and existence in postwar art. His Date Paintings (Today Series), begun in 1966, consist of canvases on which the date of their making is painted in the language of the country where the work was produced, each housed in a cardboard box lined with that day’s newspaper. Alongside these, Kawara produced telegram series, postcard series (I Got Up), and I Am Still Alive telegrams, all of which measure existence through minimal linguistic acts repeated over time. His work has been exhibited at Documenta 5 (1972) and acquired by major international institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Guggenheim Museum.