Biography
Jiří “Georg” Dokoupil is a German-Czech painter, draughtsman and graphic artist. He is one of the representatives of the Jungen Wilden of the 1980s.
In 1968 the family fled from Czechoslovakia to Germany. From 1976 to 1978 Dokoupil studied art in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main and in New York at the Cooper Union with the conceptual artist Hans Haacke. Since 1980 he belonged to the Cologne artist group Mülheimer Freiheit together with Walter Dahn, Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger. The young artists shared a backyard studio in the street “Mülheimer Freiheit” in Cologne, which leads to the Rhine. In 1982 he had his first exhibition of joint pictures with Walter Dahn. In the same year he took part in the documenta 7 in Kassel. From 1983 to 1984 he taught at the State Academy of Art in Düsseldorf together with Walter Dahn. In 1984 he was represented at Von hier aus – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst (From here on – Two months of new German art) in Düsseldorf. Dokoupil has been teaching at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the Academy of Fine Arts, in Madrid since 1989. Because of his renunciation of his own artistic handwriting, he is nicknamed “The Sphinx”.
Since 1986 Dokoupil has been painting his pictures without a brush. He uses different techniques and materials such as candles, car tires and paint sprays. For his erotic works he uses breast milk and candle soot. More recent works have leopards, children or whips as motives. In 2003/2004 he was represented with works in the exhibition Obsessive Malerei – Ein Rückblick auf die Neuen Wilden (Obsessive Painting – A Review of the Neuen Wilden) in Karlsruhe. In 2005 his exhibition “Painting in the 21st century – retrospective 1981-2005” in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg was much noticed. It was shown in Prague at the National Gallery in 2006.
Dokoupil never wanted to be subordinated to a personal or fixed style. Thus, he never developed a uniform style that would make his works instantly recognisable as his own. Rather, he paraphrased various styles, played with them and constantly invented new techniques with which he experimented excessively. Probably only the certain expressiveness and his affinity for eroticism can be underlined as continuous characteristics in his work. His work today consists of more than 60 so-called series and well over 100 different styles and techniques.
Dokoupil lives and works in Berlin and Prague.
