Born: August 27, 1931, in Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, France.
Died: August 6, 2011, in Chieti, Italy
Early days. Opałka was born to Polish parents. The family returned to Poland in 1936 and was deported to Germany in 1940. Liberated by the American troups they returned to Poland in 1946. During 1946-1948 Opałka studied lithography at a graphics school of Walbrzych Nowa Ruda before enrolling in 1949 in the School of Art and Design in Lodz. In 1956 he earned a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Career. Italy. In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Opałka began painting numbers from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, which the artist called a 'detail', took up counting where the last left off. Each 'detail' is the same size (196 x 135 cm), the dimension of his studio door in Warsaw. All details have the same title, "1965 / 1 – ∞"; the project had no definable end, and the artist pledged his life to its ongoing execution: 'All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life', 'the problem is that we are, and are about not to be'. He had contemplated and tried many different ways to visualize time before settling on this life's work. Over the years there were changes to the process. In Opałka's first details he painted white numbers onto a black background. In 1968 he changed to a grey background 'because it's not a symbolic color, nor an emotional one', and in 1972 he decided he would gradually lighten this grey background by adding 1 per cent more white to the ground with each passing detail. Also in 1968 he introduced to the process a tape recorder, speaking each number into the microphone as he painted it, and also began taking passport-style photographs of himself standing before the canvas after each day's work. He expected to be painting virtually in white on white by the time he reached 7777777 (he did not use commas or number breaks in the works): 'My objective is to get up to the white on white and still be alive.' He moved back to France in 1977 and lived in Teille, near Le Mans, and in Venice (Italy), As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. Adopting this rigorously serialized approach, Opałka aligned himself with other artists of the time who explored making art through systems and mathematics, like Daniel Buren, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven. He was represented in Paris and New York by Yvon Lambert and in Venice by Galleria Michela Rizzo. In 2007 Opałka participated at the symposium "Personal Structures Time-Space-Existence" a project initiated by the artist Rene Rietmeyer. The final number he painted was 5,607,249.
Exhibitions. Opałka participated in many of the art world’s most important international exhibitions, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1977; the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1987; and the Venice Biennale, in 1995, 2003, 2011 and 2013. He was represented in Paris and New York by Yvon Lambert, in Venice by Galleria Michela Rizzo and, for many years, at John Weber in New York. In 2003, Les Rencontres d'Arles exhibited his work through "L’œuvre photographique"'s exhibition.
Collections. Opałka's works can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and New York’s Museum of Modern Art among others.
Personal. In 1950 he married Alina Piekarczyk (marriage dissolved); in 1976 he married Marie-Madeleine Gazeau. Opalka’s paintings reached the highest prices compared to other living Polish painters: in 2010 an unknown
buyer paid about 1 million us dollars for three of Opalka’s details.
Medals, awards. 1968: Grand Prize of the 1st International Biennial of Arts and Graphics In Bradford, Great Britain; 1969: Grand Prize of the 7th International Biennial of Arts and Graphics of Cracow; 1970: C. K. Norwid Art Critics Award; 1991: Franceʼs National Painting Prize; 1993: Germanyʼs Kaiser Prize; 2009: named Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and of Letters) in Paris, France; Gold Medal of the Cultural Merit « Gloria Artis », Warsaw, Poland.
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Roman Opalka".
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Official website (in French)
Published on 10/5/15
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