On Kawara — Early Works — David Zwirner Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 9 days: November 23, 2024 → January 24, 2025

David Zwirner is pleased to announce two exhibitions of paintings by On Kawara (1932–2014), which will be on view concurrently at the gallery’s Paris and London locations. The presentations are organized in collaboration with the One Million Years Foundation, established by the artist during his lifetime to ensure the legacy of his work and fluid approach to his practice. These exhibitions are the gallery’s first presentations of Kawara’s work since his death in 2014 and offer a rare opportunity to view two significant bodies of paintings by the artist.

The presentation in Paris will feature four rarely seen early paintings made by Kawara in Tokyo in 1955 and 1956. For the young artist, an active and vocal participant in the city’s avant-garde art community, painting provided an avenue for thinking through the palpable collective trauma that loomed over his native country in the postwar years. Kawara quickly distinguished himself from his peers; rather than depicting atrocities that remained fresh in the minds of Japanese citizens, the artist chose to evoke their psychological resonances, marshaling form and content in service of one another to channel the elusive feelings of unease, anger, and disillusionment. These enigmatic and highly accomplished works, which count among the earliest known instances of an artist working on shaped canvases, simultaneously seem to collapse and expand space, drastically unmooring the viewer’s understanding of perspective and testifying to the experience of a particular time and place.

Kawara’s first exhibition with David Zwirner took place in 1999. During his lifetime, the gallery mounted five solo presentations of the artist’s work, with subsequent shows taking place in 2001, 2004, 2009, and 2012.