Jiri Georg Dokoupil, CZ

Throughout his artistic career, Jiri Georg Dokoupil’s work has been characterised by obsessive versatility and experimentation.

He first garnered recognition for the breadth of his dynamic and expressive paintings, incorporating various materials and techniques to explore themes related to consumerism, spirituality, and the human condition, reflecting the contemporary cultural and social dynamics. Dokoupil’s practice is firmly grounded in a deep engagement with art history, combined with his playful and experimental approach. His early work often challenges established ideas about art, authorship, and the role of the artist in contemporary society.

Dokoupil’s wide ranging visual worlds are created through unconventional technical inventions: he puts colour of canvas with a whip or with car tires, he creates candle paintings using soot, or binds oil paints into soap bubbles just to let them burst on the surface. The artist fixes the ephemeral within each of his canvases, creating enchanting works that play with colour, light and shadow, the organic and the meticulous.

Jiri Georg Dokoupil was born in 1954 in Krnov, Czech Republic. He lives and works between Berlin, Prague, Plovdiv, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Gran Canaria. He was the co-founder of the artist group Mülheimer Freiheit, Cologne which was a significant part the Neue Wilde movement in Europe and the USA in the late 1970s early 80s who sought to explore a contemporary expression for their art by using a neo-expressive, figurative style of intensely colourful painting with traditional subjects and by overriding the intellectual, reduced formal language of Minimal and Conceptual art. Dokoupil also taught as a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Art of Dusseldorf from 1983-84 and in Madrid in 1989.

The artist is represented in several prominent public collections worldwide, including Musée national d’Art moderne Centre Pompidou in France; Sammlung Ludwig, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Sammlung Metzger, Museum am Ostwall, Museum Folkwang, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, Neues Museum and Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart in Germany; Horsens Kunstmuseum in Denmark; The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea; Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain; Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland; and Sonnabend Collection, Hammer Museum in the USA.