Gallery Shimada, Kobe Christie's, New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, May 12, 2010, lot 411 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
May 10, 1989 marks the twenty-third year in On Kawara’s celebrated Date Paintings, in which he has endeavored to paint the day of his painting’s execution upon the surface of a canvas with liquitex. Kawara’s compositional changes over the past five decades he has spent on the series have been few indeed, with only slight early modifications in color (experimenting for a time in red) and, later, a variation on the nature of his typeface. In the present lot, Kawara presents us his activity during the day of May 10, 1989 with his standardized style—neutral and straightforward, yet also highly intense in its forcefulness and associative power.
In picking a specific date for the execution of a painting, Kawara necessarily gives way to the inevitability of the future, as simply selecting a day is enough to acknowledge the ephemeral power of time. The psychological reflex for the observer is the emotional struggle to comprehend their own existence on May 10, 1989, but also to mentally paint the scene of Kawara’s date, filling in the holes of such a day in their own personal history. Accompanyed by a clipping from The New York Times on the day of its creation, May 10, 1989 asserts its execution in Kawara’s adopted city. The clipping is a proof of existence in some terms, giving irrefutable evidence that Kawara was in the city at the same of the painting’s creation. In the twenty four years since the execution of May 10, 1989, Kawara has continued to create his paintings uninterrupted, a fruitful future from every date in the past. “A readable and visible image does not simply arise from nowhere but grows out of a preceding artistic period to exist at a given moment, and becomes history, setting a date with regard to that particular moment.”(T. Davila, “Setting a Date,” On Kawara: The ‘90s, Geneva, 2004, p. 44)
