20,204 days
Date Painting (18 April-28 May 1988).
10 black & white illus. 4to, printed wrappers, staple-bound. Nagoya: Akira Ikeda Gallery, 1988.
An uncommon On Kawara catalogue, it presents an extremely rare consecutive week of the artist’s Date Paintings (5-11 April, 1987). Begins with an essay by Kikuko Amagasaki (“On Kawara: Seeing and Reading”), in Japanese and English, and illustrates all ten paintings shown, all of which were executed in 1987. At the end, there is a list of the works displayed and a bibliography. This was Kawara’s third solo show with Akira Ikeda, his first took place in 1983.
From Amagasaki’s essay: “DATE PAINTING is different in its conceptual as well as its aesthetic principle; the date of today is precisely painted white on a dark rectangle, in block letters which erases any trace of action, idiosyncrasy, or chance factors. It is a combination of phonogramatic letters (alphabets) and stateless figure, a combination which is unique by definition but resembles others. Kawara’s work, however conceptual, can also be appreciated aesthetically as in the world of a Pythagorean listening to the Music of the Spheres, with a clarity and purity that we may find in mathematics or cosmology, minerals or corpuscles, so ‘cosmos,’ a word combining order and beauty.”
Near fine copy; some scuffing to the wrappers. From an edition of 1000 copies.
❧ On Kawara (Phaidon: 2002), p. 153.
Price: $250.00
Item ID: 8515
