Roman Opalka died last week at 79, according to the New York Times. The conceptual artist had seen a burst of market-changing sales in 2010 when six canvases were sold in four different lots totalling $3.2m:

All the paintings in the series bore the same title, “Opalka 1965/1 — ∞.” “All my work is a single thing, the description from one to infinity,” Mr. Opalka once wrote. “A single thing, a single life.”[…] Five years after executing his first numeral painting, he ceased all other work and devoted himself fulltime to the pursuit of infinity. In 2010, Christie’s sold three of his number paintings as a unit for $1.3 million. […]

Though his artistic quest might have seemed bloodless and abstract, Mr. Opalka described it, passionately, as a grand metaphor for human existence. “Time as we live it and as we create it embodies our progressive disappearance,” he wrote in an essay in 1987. “We are at the same time alive and in the face of death — that is the mystery of all living beings.”

Roman Oplaka, an Artist of Numbers, Dies at 79 (New York Times)