Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Jiri Georg Dokoupil is a contemporary German-Czech artist and founding member of the artist groups Mülheimer Freiheit and Junge Wilde—these artists flourished in Cologne during the late 1970s and early ’80s and were concerned with the burgeoning movement of Neo-expressionism. Like his peers, Dokoupil developed a painting style that drew on bright colors and traditional subject matter (his work is closely connected to the paintings of Julian Schnabel). Turned off by the intellectualism of the Minimalist movement and the esoteric nature of Conceptual Art, Dokoupil sought to develop an artistic practice that embraced the more “accessible” aspects of painting, and he thus developed an exuberant form of painting, characterized by bold figures and shapes. Additionally, during the late ’80s, the artist pioneered a new technique termed “soot painting,” through which he paints projected images either with a torch or the soot from a burning candle—today, Dokoupil is best known for these paintings.

Dokoupil has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions including: the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, the Centraal Museum in Utrech, and the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. His work was also presented at dOCUMENTA 7 and the Venice Biennale in both 1982 and 1983.