19.03.–26.04.1989

John Ahearn, Thomas Bayrle, Jonathan Borofsky, George Brecht, Ernst Caramelle, Michael Croissant, Ludwig Gosewitz, Jörg Immendorff, Raimer Jochims, Per Kirkeby, Robert Mangold, Allan McCollum, Reinhard Mucha, Christa Näher, Hermann Nitsch, A.R. Penck, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Ulrich Rückriem, Edward Ruscha, Thomas Schütte, Hans Steinbrenner, Gerhard Wittner

The Japanese artist On Kawara (born in 1933 in Kariya/Aichi/Japan, living in New York) has been pursuing, since 1966, in an extremely stringent and disciplined way a concept thematising the unity of artistic production, subjective biography, and collective life-span. At the centre of this artistic concept are the date pictures: unframed canvases in five different formats covered with monochrome acrylic paint and displaying the date on which they were painted, always using the same typography. The date is written in the respective language of the place where On Kawara painted the picture. In addition, each picture has a cardboard-box for storage with a newspaper cutting from the date and place of origin pasted to the bottom, in those cases in which the picture format is not larger than the newspaper. Each picture also has a subtitle; until 1972 this was a piece of news from the respective paper, since 1973 it is the respective day of the week in the local language of the place the picture was painted.

The exhibition at Portikus consists of 23 date pictures from 1966-1988. They are shown with 24 works of art by other artists from the respective years. Afterwards, Kawara's pictures will be exhibited in Chicago at the Renaissance Society and in Nagoya at I.C.A. The concept of the exhibition is therefore aimed at presenting and discussing contemporary art of the respective locality, with the curators selecting the works of art together with committed local artists and collectors.

Photos: Katrin Schilling