On Kawara: Silence, a quietly rapturous exhibition that opens this
weekend at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, showcases
the career of an artist who used minimal means for maximum effect.
The artist died last year while preparing this show - instantly
transforming his sequential paintings from an open-ended feat to a
closed structure - and I had expected, when the show was announced,
that Kawara’s insistently spare art would feel funereal in the
Guggenheim’s grand spiral. I was wrong; it is a joy. Like each of
his date paintings, the exhibition is somehow awesome and modest at
once. It reckons with the grandest questions of being and time, and
yet feels lived in, comfortable, and winningly unpretentious. It
brings cosmic time down to human scale, and then makes an
individual life feel as broad as the universe.
*The Guardian*
Like a true Conceptualist, Mr. Kawara stuck to the facts and also
transcended them, endowing them with a resonant appeal and a sense
of form as fine-tuned as any Minimalist sculptor’s. His art helped
shape Conceptualism’s love of uninflected information. It fused the
movement’s basic duality of image plus text into an instantly
legible unit before it actually existed. It also bridged the gap
between the modernist monochrome as devotional object and the
Duchampian ready-made.
*The New York Times*
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