Roman Opałka valuation
Painted the numbers from one towards infinity for forty-six years, photographing his own face at the end of every session.
What a work by Roman Opałka is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Roman Opałka was born at Abbeville in France in 1931 to Polish parents, returned to Poland after the war and trained in Łódź and Warsaw. In 1965, in his Warsaw studio, he began the work that took the rest of his life: OPALKA 1965/1–∞, the numbers painted in sequence in white on a grey ground, left to right and top to bottom, across canvases of identical size that he called Details. He spoke each number aloud into a tape recorder as he painted it and photographed his face in the same light at the end of every session. From 1972 he added one per cent more white to the ground of each successive canvas, so that over decades the work moved towards white on white and towards illegibility. He had passed five and a half million when he died in 2011.
The Details are the work, and each is identified by the run of numbers it contains, which also fixes its date and its place in the progression towards white — a late, pale canvas and an early, dark one are not interchangeable. Alongside them are the travelling gouaches on paper made away from the studio, the photographic self-portraits and a small number of editions. Condition is exacting: thin white paint on a grey ground shows every scuff, and the palest canvases are the least forgiving of all. The estate and its archive are the authority.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
