On Kawara

The earliest and longest-running such project was the Today series, also called the Date Paintings, which Kawara began in January 1966 and continued until late 2013. He made thousands of these paintings—each taking eight or nine hours to complete—by creating a dense surface of acrylic paint and hand-drawing letters and numbers to spell out a single date that constitutes the title of the work. Kawara’s self-prescribed rules dictated that each painting be completed within a single day or destroyed, and established parameters for the size, orientation, color palette, and text. Each work also includes a handmade storage box, which since late 1966 the artist has lined with news clippings for that date from the city in which he made the painting. Such simple and rigid formulas belie the complexity and physical intensity of the task Kawara set out for himself, cataloging his days through his own mechanical labor.

JULY 4, 1967 is an early example from the series, aptly subtitled by the artist “Independence Day.” Yet what we learn through the clippings from a New York tabloid is simply the quotidian news of births, deaths, and sports scores. That these everyday events exist within the subjects of his paintings—days, months, and years— hold up Kawara’s project and repetitive process as a meditation on living and dying.