Roman Opałka

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Roman Opalka, 1995

Roman Opałka (born August 27, 1931 in Hocquincourt ; † August 6, 2011 in Rome , Italy ) was a French - Polish artist who dealt artistically in his work with the question of temporality in particular . In art studies, his work is usually assigned to conceptual art .

Life

Born in Picardy in northern France , Opalka moved to Poland with his parents in 1935 when he was just four years old . During the Second World War his family was deported to Germany , but shortly before the end of the war they were liberated by US soldiers, brought back to France and finally returned to Poland in 1946.

At the age of 16, Opalka began an apprenticeship as a printmaker in Wałbrzych, Lower Silesia . From 1949 he finally attended the art school in Łódź and from 1951 to 1956 the art academy in Warsaw . During this time he also met his first wife, Alina Piekarczyk.

His teachers included u. a. the painter Władysław Strzemiński , who introduced the young Opalka to contemporary avant-garde art. In the mid-1960s, Opalka began a series of pictures with “1965/1 – ∞” in which only consecutive rows of numbers could be seen. Every day after working on these images, a photograph was taken in front of the plant. When priming the pictures in this series, Opalka continuously lightened the color used by a small amount with white. The result was an artistic “diary” that was to end with an empty picture just before the artist's death. With this work Opalka, who had lived in Bazérac in the south of France since 1977 together with his partner Marie-Madeleine Gazeau, was represented at numerous international exhibitions. a. 1977 at the documenta 6 in Kassel .

In 1993 Opalka received the Goslarer Kaiserring , in 2002 he was awarded the Gerhard Altenbourg Prize .

Up to $ 1,200,000 US dollars have been paid for oil paintings Opalkas in the art market.

plant

After a few attempts in the tradition of constructivism and abstract painting of the 1940s and 1950s, Opalka found a solution in a work that he considered to be the fundamental problem of the modern artistic avant-garde (reunification of art and life) "1965/1 – ∞" called.

1965/1 – ∞

With a bare eye, Opalka wrote the number "1" in the upper left corner of a specially prepared canvas in 1965 with titanium white paint and the smallest available brush on a dark background and began so, according to the writing direction from left to right and in the Latin alphabet continue to count from top to bottom towards infinity. The size of the font corresponds primarily to the size and texture of the canvas. At the beginning of his project, the artist attached great importance to this crucial component - the individual canvas, which Opalka henceforth referred to as “detail” according to his conception. After using canvases of the same size (196 × 135 cm), initially with an unchanged dark gray background, he began to lighten the background from “detail” to “detail” by adding one percent more white. In this way he succeeded in increasing the progressive element of his artistic activity beyond the continuous counting: Not only the numerical values ​​in Opalka's work are getting higher and higher, the pictures are also getting lighter and brighter. By the time he died, 233 "details" were created up to the number 5,607,249.

Tape recordings

Opal's work gained a decisive dimension when the artist began to speak the respective written number and to record his speech on a sound carrier. The speaking and writing took place completely simultaneously, whereby the artist was favored by the fact that his Polish mother tongue reproduces the numerals exactly in the order of the digits. These records gained in importance, especially in later times, as the canvases on which Opalka wrote his numbers with white paint became lighter and lighter and the numbers became more and more invisible.

Self-portraits

Roman Opalka, portrayed by
Lothar Wolleh in the “Self-Portrait”

Opalka began very early on to take a photographic self-portrait at the end of each working day : Always wearing the same clothes - the artist was wearing a simple white shirt - under the same lighting conditions, with the same, preferably "neutral" facial expression, he photographed himself with one of them a self-timer equipped camera in front of the screen he had just been working on.

Working method

Opalka dipped his brush - as mentioned, he always used the smallest brush available in art supplies (No. 0) - only when he had finished writing a number. The end of a number is, so to speak, the smallest incision at which, as the artist said, an increased "tension" builds up. Further cuts are the last number of a day, a “detail” or a particularly striking number (e.g. 9999). After completing the “detail”, the brush used was marked with the first and last number executed with it and kept. It is therefore not a mere tool, but a certain part of Opalka's life's work. Opalka lived with his work: that did not allow him long-term interruptions to his work, just as one cannot really interrupt life. If the artist wanted to go on a journey, he first finished the “detail” he was working on and then began a “travel map” that was also fixed in size, which he in turn only finished with a “detail” with continuous counting to start. Otherwise, he sought proximity to his work. Opalka did not separate the studio and the place of residence. So his life remained in the greatest possible harmony with his work.

Catalogs

  • Roman Opalka 1965/1-∞, Trace of Time , published by Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (1992–1993). Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna (1993), with CD. Bremen 1992 (open), ISBN 3-928761-03-X
  • Roman Opalka . For the award of the Goslarer Kaiserring on October 23, 1993 and for the exhibition in the Mönchehaus-Museum für Moderne Kunst Goslar. Edited by the cultural office of the city of Goslar. Goslar 1993.
  • Opalka 1965/1 - infinite . Neue Nationalgalerie and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, April 8 - June 26, 1994. Edited by Britta Schmitz, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-88609-329-8

literature

  • Thomas Deecke: Roman Opałka - The lived moment - This work is created in order to better understand life in AEIUO periodico trimestrale diretta di Bruno Cora, No. 20–22, p. 77 ff, Rome 1987,
  • Roman Opalka: Anti-Sisyphus (autobiography). With a critical apparatus from Christian Schlatter. Translated by Hubertus von Gemmingen . Stuttgart: Cantz 1994, ISBN 3-89322-277-4 .
  • Thomas Deecke: I shape the time, not the moment! . In: Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art , Vol. 15. Munich: Kindl 1991.
  • Friedhelm Mennekes , Franz Joseph van der Grinten (ed.): Contemplation and abstraction. Dealing with a topic of contemporary art . Stuttgart: KBW 1987, ISBN 3-460-32471-6 , pp. 133-147.
  • Marco A. Sorace: Temporality and Affectivity. Roman Opalka's art from a life-phenomenological perspective . In: Günter Funke, Rolf Kühn , Renate Stachura (eds.): Existential analysis and life phenomenology. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-495-48162-2 , pp. 109-131.
  • Heinz-Norbert Jocks: The ear at the crime scene, Heinz-Norbert Jocks in conversation with Gotthard Graubner, Heinz Mack, Roman Opalka, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2009, ISBN 978-3-7757-2509-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Conceptual artist Roman Opalka has died. In: news.orf.at. August 6, 2011, accessed October 22, 2017 .
  2. https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/deces-du-peintre-polonais-roman-opalka-06-08-2011-1360235_3.php
  3. Information on the website of a globally active auction house , accessed on August 7, 2011.