“OPALKA 1965/1-∞, Detail 4739782-4742554 (carte de voyage)”

Details

The work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné currently being prepared by Roman Opalka under the number Dcv446. Provenance:Private collection, Poland; Galerie ZAK BRANICKA, Berlin; private collection, Switzerland, acquired from the aforementioned in 2011.

Description

•Part of the artist’s magnificent life’s work
•965 / endless
•The consistency with which Roman Opalka remained true to the underlying concept of his art, the link between his work and his life as an artist, is unique in 20th century art – his works were shown in solo exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna and the Nationalgalerie Berlin, among others The year 1965 marked an important turning point in the work of the Polish-French artist Roman Opalka. Still living in Warsaw at the time, he began work on his magnum opus – his life’s work: “1965 / 1 – infinite”. Using titanium white paint, he wrote the number “1” in the top left-hand corner of a dark primed canvas and continued to count infinitely from left to right. From 1972 onwards, he documented the creation of each work by recording the numbers on tape. Over the years, Opalka’s concept became increasingly strict and the canvases all had to be the same size. At the end of each working day, he added a photographic self-portrait, always in a white shirt, always with the same neutral facial expression. In 1972, he also decided to lighten the undercoat by 1% from canvas to canvas. In the end, the figures are barely recognisable. By the time of his death, he had created 233 “details” on canvas up to the number 5,607,249. When he was travelling, Roman Opalka used paper and pencil or ink to continue this enormous work of art – creating so-called “travel maps” or “travel drawings”. Each painting or drawing picks up where the previous one left off. Depending on the intensity of the colour application, a vibrant, lively web of figures emerges before the viewer’s eyes. Through this strictly conceptual approach, Opalka’s work merges life time and working time: through the systematic development and materialisation of his idea, he succeeds in making time visible and confronting the viewer with the question of temporality. The consistency with which Roman Opalka pursued his concept is absolutely unique: time itself runs through his pictures, his work fulfils itself in the infinite progression of time.