In Venice and Milan, Roman Opałka stars in a two-part exhibition

Milan and Venice pay tribute to Roman OpaÅ‚ka (Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, 1931 - Rome, 1911), an important 20th-century artist, with the retrospective Dire il tempo, a project curated by Chiara Bertola. The exhibition, realized in two chapters, at the BUILDING space in Milan (May 4 to July 20, 2019) and at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice (May 7 to November 24, 2019), delves into OpaÅ‚ka’s research through a selection of key works from his career.

Both exhibitions focus on the OPALKA 1965 / 1-∞ program, in which the artist engaged much of his existence in an attempt to represent the passage of time and circumscribe infinity within visible and measurable forms.

In Venice, a nucleus of works by Mariateresa Sartori (Venice, 1961), who had woven an intense frequentation with the artist in the city, will also be presented. Interested in neuroscience, music and language, her works will establish a dialogue with OpaÅ‚ka’s works, through their common research on the themes of memory, duration, contingency, and the shared search for a visible capable of expressing the invisible.

Roman Opałka has dedicated his life to the attempt to represent something that is not measurable, namely the passage of time, managing to restore its visual form through number as the basic element of a continuous and potentially infinite sequence, which has coincided with his existence. This program of his work began in 1965: from that date, in fact, Opałka began counting from 1 to infinity, and he did so by painting numbers on the canvas, with a fine-tipped brush, in progression until they saturated the surface.

The Venetian exhibition was also made possible by the generous collaboration of Anneliese Lenz and the support of galleries Lévy Gorvy, New York; Michela Rizzo, Venice; Studio G7, Bologna; and Doppelgaenger, Bari.

On May 6 and 7, 2019, Didier Morin ’s film Le dernier Détail peint de Roman OpaÅ‚ka, which depicts the time of OpaÅ‚ka’s painting, is also being presented to the public for the first time at theAuditorium of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. The artist was filmed and recorded during forty or so sessions as he executed what would be his last Détail, in his atelier in Bois Mauclair, where everything turns to the sacred, when he repeats aloud the numbers he is painting.

The exhibition will run from May 7 to Nov. 24.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia.

Photo credit: André Morin

Source: press release

In Venice and Milan, Roman Opałka stars in a two-part exhibition

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