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Lot Essay
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, Dec. 24, 2006 is part of On Kawara’s decades-long ‘date paintings’ project, for which he completed each work in a single day. Across an immaculate surface, Kawara wrote the titular date in a crisp hand, the white letters glowing vividly against the dark ground. The present painting was created while he was in New York City: his location always determined the format and language of the date. Despite the fact that it is Christmas Eve, the artist’s seemingly objective depiction ignores the day’s festive associations. Besides being a holiday, 24 December was also Kawara’s birthday. Dec. 24, 2006, as such, subtly marks occasions both personal and public.
Using a limited colour palette, Kawara would begin each date painting by applying four coats of paint to the canvas before outlining his text and filling in the letters and numbers in white. As he worked—ruler and X-Acto blade in hand—Kawara corrected any imperfections, but if a painting was not finished by midnight, he would destroy it. If completed, details of the painting’s size, colour, and date would be noted in a journal. The final work was stored in a bespoke box lined with a newspaper from that same day and place. The box interior for Dec. 24, 2006 features an edition of that day’s New York Post; a reference to ‘Scrooge’ in the headline is the only acknowledgement of the holiday.
As Kawara’s date paintings were created over many years, they both represent and manifest time. Artists have used serialisation to visualise time since the late nineteenth century, when the Impressionists began to paint the world that they inhabited. Artists such as Claude Monet began to serialise motifs and, in doing so, gave image to temporality. In Monet's celebrated depictions of Rouen Cathedral or haystacks captured in the shifting light, time is at once individual to each composition and coherent across the entire sequence. Monet was as interested in his motif as he was in the ‘aestheticisation of time’, an attention that characterises both Kawara’s date paintings specifically and the artist’s practice at large (A. Dombrowski, Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialisation of Time, New Haven, 2023, p. 185).
In many ways, to speak of Kawara is to speak of time itself. For more than four decades, the artist was its preeminent chronicler. Informed by existentialism—particularly the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre—Kawara saw the present as the only true and comprehensible reality, and his art was an ongoing affirmation of his presence in the world. The date paintings commemorate his existence and serve as a record of what was but now no longer is. Dec. 24, 2006 considers how we observe the passing days and years. But even as the present work records a specific moment, such paintings seem to ask whether it is ever possible to truly save time.
Using a limited colour palette, Kawara would begin each date painting by applying four coats of paint to the canvas before outlining his text and filling in the letters and numbers in white. As he worked—ruler and X-Acto blade in hand—Kawara corrected any imperfections, but if a painting was not finished by midnight, he would destroy it. If completed, details of the painting’s size, colour, and date would be noted in a journal. The final work was stored in a bespoke box lined with a newspaper from that same day and place. The box interior for Dec. 24, 2006 features an edition of that day’s New York Post; a reference to ‘Scrooge’ in the headline is the only acknowledgement of the holiday.
As Kawara’s date paintings were created over many years, they both represent and manifest time. Artists have used serialisation to visualise time since the late nineteenth century, when the Impressionists began to paint the world that they inhabited. Artists such as Claude Monet began to serialise motifs and, in doing so, gave image to temporality. In Monet's celebrated depictions of Rouen Cathedral or haystacks captured in the shifting light, time is at once individual to each composition and coherent across the entire sequence. Monet was as interested in his motif as he was in the ‘aestheticisation of time’, an attention that characterises both Kawara’s date paintings specifically and the artist’s practice at large (A. Dombrowski, Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialisation of Time, New Haven, 2023, p. 185).
In many ways, to speak of Kawara is to speak of time itself. For more than four decades, the artist was its preeminent chronicler. Informed by existentialism—particularly the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre—Kawara saw the present as the only true and comprehensible reality, and his art was an ongoing affirmation of his presence in the world. The date paintings commemorate his existence and serve as a record of what was but now no longer is. Dec. 24, 2006 considers how we observe the passing days and years. But even as the present work records a specific moment, such paintings seem to ask whether it is ever possible to truly save time.