In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Roman Opalka began painting a process of counting, beginning with the number one and continuing to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were meticulously painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, which the artist called a “detail”, continued counting up from where the last canvas left off.

The canvas for each détail is the same size, measuring 196cm x 135cm, which corresponds to the dimension of his studio door in Warsaw. All détails have the same title, 1965 / 1 – ∞. The concept had no end, and the artist pledged his life to its execution:

All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life.

In 1968, Opalka introduced a tape recorder into his process, speaking each number into the microphone as he painted it. He also began taking passport-style photographs of himself standing before the canvas after each day's work, a ritual bookkeeping of passing time.

The process was endless, but measured against its goal—infinity—it is as naught: “The problem is that we are, and are about not to be.” Jacques Roubaud said:

Roman Opalka has done what a man couldn't imagine doing to approach the idea of infinite, the infinite in the finite time, through non-discursive, non-mathematical, irreducibly personal but at the same time given to all of us.

Over the years, there were some changes to his ritual. In Opalka's first detail series, he painted white numbers onto a black background. In 1968, he changed to a grey background. According the artist this was “…because it's not a symbolic colour, nor an emotional one”. In 1972, he decided he would gradually lighten this grey background by adding more white by a measurement of one percent with each passing détail.

The exhibition was dedicated to the artist and included a series of self-portraits, a sound installation and video, as well as Détails. Each work bears witness to his extraordinary art—the methodical transcription of the passing of time—and the process to which he remained faithful.

"My objective is to get up to the white on white and still be alive", which he did. He continued painting till the end of his life. On the 6th of August 2011, a few days before his 80th birthday, Roman Opalka died in Chieti, Italy. His death marked the completion of his work: "the finite defined by the non-finite". He had reached the number 5607249.

Roman Opalka, 1965/1 - ∞

Pictures of the exhibition