Roman Opałka

Roman Opałka (Polish: [ˈrɔman ɔˈpawka]; 27 August 1931 – 6 August 2011) was a French-born Polish painter, whose works are mostly associated with conceptual art.

Opałka was born on 27 August 1931 in Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, France, to Polish parents. The family returned to Poland in 1946 and Opałka studied lithography at a graphics school before enrolling in the School of Art and Design in Łódź. He later earned a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He moved back to France in 1977. Opałka lived in Teille, near Le Mans, and Venice. 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 6 August 2011.

In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Opałka began painting numbers from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, which the artist called a "detail", took up counting where the last left off. Each "detail" has the same size (196 × 135 cm), the dimension of his studio door in Warsaw.