Abstract: This study examines the theoretical foundations and heuristic potential of the working concept of multiplicity. Multiplicity is understood here as a distinct compositional principle based on the use of numerous identical or equivalent elements, the quantity of which either constitutes the artistic statement itself or significantly amplifies its meaning. The subject of this research is the theoretical approaches to seriality and multiplicity in postwar Western European and American art, their conceptual foundations, interrelation, and delineation as categories belonging to different levels of analysis of the artwork: seriality is understood as a conceptual principle governing the procedure of element generation, whereas multiplicity is understood as the visual logic of the work itself, determining the character of its perception by the viewer. The paper draws on the major English-language publications devoted to seriality in the art practice of the postwar period (approx. 1960–1980s). Through a critical analysis of these texts, it identifies the conceptual basis for delineating the concepts of seriality and multiplicity. The article finds that the existing literature on seriality already contains the theoretical premises necessary for such a distinction. This possibility is most explicitly articulated in Mel Bochner’s seminal 1967 essay The Serial Attitude. However, in subsequent decades, multiplicity was not developed within the art historical discourse as an independent artistic phenomenon. Instead, it is consistently treated as a subordinate or comparatively «simple» instance of repetition, modular organization, or grid structure: in other words, as a particular case of seriality, rather than as a distinct visual logic with its own defining characteristics, theoretical foundations and historical trajectory. Without positioning multiplicity in direct opposition to seriality, the working concept proposed here offers a more comprehensive and systematic means of describing and classifying artistic practices that have previously been interpreted exclusively through theoretical models developed for serial art.

Keywords: multiplicity, serial art, repetition, modular structure, postwar art, seriality, shaping, accumulation, serial attitude, Mel Bochner