Roman Opalka

This monograph investigates Opalka’s relationship with numbers, time and infinity, including an original long-term interview of the artist which ran on for more than twenty years.

In 1965 Roman Opalka started to represent time (his own and the world’s) by painting numbers on canvas. Beginning with the number 1 and continuing through 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on, he had reached the almost unimaginable figure of 5 million before his death in 2011. Opalka had chosen to come directly to grips with time and death, for a lifetime. Yet his program, though irreducibly singular, is not ineffable. This volume explores the ethical and aesthetical dimensions of Opalka’s project and presents him as one of the major artists of the late twentieth century.