Thursday, April 9, 2015

On Kawara - Silence at Guggenheim Museum

On Kawara - Silence at Guggenheim Museum

Annually, the Guggenheim museum presents a huge solo exhibition using most of the entire gallery space. It seems more special than any other years because it is the first full retrospective exhibition of the artist, On Kawara, who died in the last July. As a big fan of Kawara, it is good chance to remember him and admire his life and works in just one space. Since it is a retrospective exhibition, there are huge amount of works from every category of his conceptual projects which were done in daily based during his life. 


*the copyright of this image is the Guggenheim Museum

Especially, I was very impressed by the amount of the date paintings (the Today series) in chronological order, in different size and color. They usually are displayed just paintings only before but in this time they are all organized with the boxes which are the cover of the each paintings for their storage and which are also has the newspapers of that dates inside of the boxes. Also I found out in my second visit that they show this series of paintings from its start which is January 4, 1966 and the end which is January 12, 2013. The show was a good time to know a great conceptual artist who worked every single days in his own rules and Kawara did not give talks much about his works but you can found the power and depth in that silence.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Eunjin. I think you should talk about the exhibit more and how the curator(s) managed to display Kawara's works in a cohesive fashion. I personally found it interesting how Kawara's concept of time (a rather linear concept) is juxtaposed against the spiral architecture of Guggenheim. I also thought some areas of the exhibit were a bit repetitive, although that is the nature of his work, but this is just my opinion and something to consider from a curatorial viewpoint. I know you liked the exhibit from reading your entry but I just wish it had more objective analysis of the exhibit itself.

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  2. Hi Eunjin. I already start to like his work when you say they took up a whole gallery space. But maybe you should talk more about how they were arranged or oriented. I have also been to his show, and the date painting was definitely my favorite. It is great how you mentioned they were presented. They were in boxes form which stand out a lot more along with the curvature wall of the building. Maybe you should also talk about your experience or feeling when you walked through his works. It is because when I am walking, the date paintings actually guide my direction. I felt like I was walking into his daily with all the different dates. Anyways, I could feel his artistic life in the silent exhibition which is very interesting.

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