The Japanese artist On Kawara, who has died aged 81, would not have wanted an obituary like this. He would have preferred the page to be left blank except for his name and the number of days he had been alive. He was preoccupied with the passing of time, and when asked for his biography for an exhibition catalogue he would respond simply with the number of days elapsed between his date of birth and the date of the exhibition opening. This was consistent with the existentialist proposition of his work: that human life does not add up to anything beyond itself. He explored the nature of our consciousness, enhanced by a kind of meditation on living through time.
His most famous work, the Today Series (19662014), is an accumulation of thousands of "Date Paintings". In these works the date on which the painting was made is meticulously painted in white sans serif text, at the centre of a canvas coated with flat colour, with the month spelled out in the language of the place where it was made (unless the Roman alphabet was not used for the first language, in which case Kawara resorted to Esperanto). The paintings were produced in more than 112 cities worldwide. If a Date Painting was not finished by the end of the day, by midnight, he would destroy it.
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