Description
Time, as registered in its familiar increments of days, years, centuries, and eons, has preoccupied On Kawara since the mid-1960s, when he began his magnum opus, the Today Series. Each of the Date Paintings that constitute this ongoing work is a monochrome field on which is inscribed the date of the day on which the individual painting is executed, in the language and according to the calendrical conventions of the country in which Kawara is present when he begins it.1 If he does not complete it by midnight he destroys it. Some days he makes more than one; very occasionally, a third is added to that second before the midnight deadline strikes. Most days he makes none.
