Roman Opałka was one of the best-known Polish artists outside Poland - a painter, the author of unusual "spatial arrangements." In his works, all the visual elements play an equal role together with the phonic (his voice counting the numbers that he paints on the canvas).
Background
Roman Opałka was born on August 27, 1931, in Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, France, to Polish parents. During the Second World War, Opałka was in Germany with his family. After the war, he returned to France, and in 1946 he was repatriated to Poland. He left the country again in 1977.
Education
Between 1949 - 1950, Roman Opałka studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź (currently the Fine Arts Academy) and after that, for six years, at the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy. Parallel to his studies, he also worked on drawing and realistic painting (which he continued until 1958). At the end of the ‘50s, he became interested in the painting of matter.
Roman Opałka moved to create monochrome compositions, the creased texture of which was at once exquisite and vivid. At that time, he also started creating abstract drawings - a form of color studies, in which he applied monotype elements investigating the gradations of whitened colors. He was also making ink drawings, the surfaces of which he filled with combinations of geometrical figures and their derivatives: grills, rhomboid forms, etc. The artist soon withdrew from experimenting with texture on a large scale, but at first, it did dominate his work, resulting in a cycle that produced a very vivid rhythm like "Chronomes", 1961 – 1963 and "Phonemats", 1963 - 1964.
Occasionally, the artist worked on paintings marked by letters of the Greek alphabet, the surface of which was relief-modeled using a wide palette-knife ("Lambda", "Kappa", "Chi"). Rigorous horizontal divisions also determined Opałka's spatial constructions (the cycle "Hovercrafts" - using canvas, batten and down, (1963 - 1964); "Integrations" - a wooden composition, (1964 - 1966)), as well as highly-valued graphic works that won numerous prizes ("Description of the World", 1968 - 1970).
The artist continued his search for a language of his own, gathering experiences and experimenting. This is proved by the fact that his first individual exhibition, in 1966, took place ten years after his graduation. However, his period of creative maturity was to arrive even later, at the beginning of the next decade. It was then that the principle of harmony and permanent systematization - that he had begun in 1965 - started to govern Opałka's art, taking the form of the "concept of progressive counting." Since then, the artist has been producing only drawings and paintings filled with a linear record of moments passing in time. “The Note” was made using white dye against a grey background, with each one being 1% paler than the preceding one.
At that time, Opałka started recording himself on tape, registering each number, and later, he also began to photograph his own face regularly while painting. During an exhibition, all these elements make up a kind of environment. The reception of these types of action (with conceptualistic roots), to a considerable degree stimulates the numerous statements made by the author himself, who emphasized that it was his goal to identify art with life. The determination with which Opałka stood by that idea met with admiration as well as negation. It sufficed to recall the extreme opinions expressed by Polish critics.
Opałka has been awarded numerous international prizes. The first were for his graphic works from the above-mentioned cycle "Description of the World" (Grand Prix at the 7th International Graphic Biennale in Bradford for the opening etching of the series - "Adam and Eve" in 1968; he also received the Grand Prix at the 3rd International Graphic Biennale in Cracow in 1969).
In 1972, during the London exhibition at the William Weston Gallery, he definitively separated himself from his previous work. To demonstrate this, he spread his drawings on the floor and put on the wall one of the "Counted Paintings" - as the only work of importance. With this gesture, he moved on to the next phase of his work that continues to this day. The painter was also honored with the C. K. Norwid Artistic Critic Award in 1970. He took part in the Biennale in Sao Paulo in 1969 and 1977 and the Documenta in Kassel in 1977, and he represented Poland during the Biennale in Venice in 1995.
In 2007 Opałka participated at the symposium "Personal Structures Time-Space-Existence" a project initiated by the artist Rene Rietmeyer. He died at age 79 after falling ill while on holiday in Italy. He was admitted to a hospital near Rome and died there a few days later, on August 6, 2011, three weeks before his 80th birthday. 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.
Opalka was inspired by Neo-Constructivists early on in his career.
Quotations:
“Time as we live it and as we create it embodies our progressive disappearance. We are at the same time alive and in the face of death — that is the mystery of all living beings.”
Connections
Opalka was twice married, first to Alina Piekarczyk and secondly to Marie-Madeleine Gazeau, who survives him.