Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image Imprimée, La Louvière

“Roman Opałka: une vie, une œuvre” (2012), a documentary by Andrzej Sapija will be screened on May 4 and 5 and on July 7, 2019 at the Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image Imprimée of La Louvière in the framework of the exhibition “Bientôt déjà hier. Métamorphoses et écoulement du temps“, that is on view from March 29 until September 2019.

About the documentary
Andrzej Sapija’s documentary dives deep into the highly mysterious career of Polish conceptual painter Roman Opałka, who spent a lifetime exploring the notion of time and its irreversibility.

Between 1965 and 2011, Opałka made canvasses on which he painted numbers in ascending order, starting with number 1. On his last canvas he reached the number 5 607 249. He worked in a very methodical fashion: he made five paintings every year, all with the same dimensions, on which he would paint in white on a black background, adding 1% of white paint per canvas. Besides this series he created a photographic portfolio making identical selfportraits every day to document his own aging process and the ruthless effects of time. 

His œuvre, one of the most radical in contemporary art history, is masterfully documented  by Andrzej Sapija.

About Andrzej Sapija
Film director Andrzej Sapija studied fine arts in his hometown of Wrocław (Poland) followed by a degree in directing form the Filmschool in Łódź. He is also a producer and teaches at the Filmschool of Łódź and the University of Warsaw. He rose to international fame thanks to his biographies of Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor and Polish writer and poet Tadeusz Rózewicz.

About Roman Opałka (1931-2011)
Roman Opałka was born on August 27, 1931 in Hocquincourt (France) to Polish parents. He studies at the Academies of Fine Art of Łódź and Warsaw. Although being a popular and well established conceptual artist in Poland in the 1960s, Opałka decided to move back to France in 1977 where he obtains citizenship in 1985. He spends the last decades of his life working obsessively on his neverending series. Opałka dies in Rome (Italy) on August 6, 2011. His work is to be found in some of the world’s largest international collections such as the ones of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Muzeum Sztuki of Łódź and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
>>> Where: Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image Imprimée, rue des Amours 10, 7100 La Louvière – map
>>> When: May 4 and 5, 2019 at 11:00 / July 7, 2019 at 17:00
>>> Tickets: € 3
>>> More information here