Towards Counting | Collection Co–selection

Roman Opałka was fascinated by numbers from the start of his career. In the first years after graduation, he created works focusing on numbers as figurative signs. In 1965, he began working on the Programme, which became his trademark – recording the passage of life (and its artistic meaning) by painting sequences of consecutive numbers. Before the artist took up this challenge, he experimented with various numerical representations. The sketch Towards Counting comes from this period.

Towards Counting is a sequence of white numbers written on cardboard painted with black ink. The sketch contains various sequences of numbers and gives the impression of a search for a way of recording them and the correct typographic form. It is likely that the title of the work was chosen later, when the artist’s Programme was refined and implemented.