On Kawara
Japan
1932-2014
On Kawara was a foundational figure of the Conceptual art movement, whose five-decade practice was dedicated to exploring the relationship between chronological time and human existence. Born in Kariya, Japan, Kawara moved to Tokyo in 1951, where he became an integral member of the postwar avant-garde. He left Japan in 1959 for Mexico City and traveled extensively between Paris and New York before permanently settling in the latter in 1964. Although based in New York, Kawara remained a peripatetic figure throughout his life, integrating the traces of his global wanderings into a rigorous system of artistic series that examine the multiplicity of lived experience.
Among his diverse bodies of work, I GOT UP (1968–1979) is considered his most personal and intimate series. Each day, the artist sent picture postcards to two different friends or colleagues, each stamped with the exact time he arose and his current address. This mechanical repetition was counterbalanced by his irregular hours and nomadic lifestyle—in 1973 alone, he sent postcards from twenty-eight different cities. By choosing the phrase "Getting up" rather than "Waking up," Kawara imbued the gesture with both carnal and existential significance. The juxtaposition of these private records with the mass-produced urban imagery on the postcards' fronts transformed a functional postal route into a minimalist and evocative urban poetry.
Kawara’s international influence was solidified in 1970 with his inclusion in the seminal exhibition Information at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. In the decades that followed, his work was the subject of numerous major retrospectives, including continuity/discontinuity (1980), which traveled from Stockholm to Osaka; Date Paintings in 89 Cities (1991–1993); and Whole and Parts (1996). In 2015, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York organized the critically acclaimed survey On Kawara—Silence, offering a comprehensive examination of his meditation on time, existence, and the intersection of art and life since 1964.
His work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, London.
