A true archivist of time, On Kawara marked the history of contemporary art thanks to his monumental series of Date Paintings, canvases marked with the exact day of their creation, and created from 1966 until his death in 2014.

A true archivist of time, On Kawara has marked the history of contemporary art thanks to his monumental series of Date Paintings, canvases marked with the exact day of their creation, and created from 1966 until his death in 2014.

On Kawara is an artist of silence and the absolute, an archivist of time whose practice transcends the anecdotal to reach the universal.

Born in 1932 in Japan, he went into exile in 1959 in New York, in 1959, in the post-war avant-garde movement. He escapes the contingencies of figuration and expressive gesture to place his work in a quest for erasure and permanence.

Son Magnum opus, the series Today, initiated in 1966 and continued until her death in 2014, is intended to be a diary of existence, a silent chronicle where each canvas, painted on the same day as its written date, becomes a conceptual stele.

To paint his Date Paintings, On Kawara is based on a rigorous protocol: a monochrome in the center of which is painted white the date of the day of production,
in the language of the country where the artist is at the time. Each painting is stored in a custom-made cardboard box and accompanied by a page from the local newspaper dated the day it was made.

Essential to On Kawara's work, process, situation, and time are articulated in a form of discourse about life, in an objective relationship between her experience and the world.

On Kawara is completing a work of monumental and universal dimensions, which is established over time through the ritual of the creation process and an ordering of time that is only delivered in fragments.

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