Jiří Georg Dokoupil: New Paintings

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Jiří Georg Dokoupil in the United States. The gallery will present an exhibition of new works by the artist titled New Paintings from January 8 – February 7, 2015 at 515 West 27th Street. This is the artist’s first solo show in New York in over two decades.

Comprised of large-scale works on canvas from the artist’s Soap Bubble Paintings series, the exhibition demonstrates Dokoupil’s continuously varied experiments with non-traditional media and chemical processes. As a founding member of the Cologne- based Mülheimer Freiheit and Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”), a group of young artists in the late 1970s, he rejected the reductive, austere, and unapproachable nature of Minimal and Conceptual Art during this time in favor of a more animated style and saturated palette.

The first Soap Bubble Paintings were developed in the early 1990s by creating alchemical compounds fusing pigment and soap in various proportions. Dokoupil stages dynamic areas of tension between chemistry and art as the traces, now consisting of soap-lye enriched with metallic pigments and diamond dust, accumulate in the form of two molecular layers and result in translucent bubbles. The resulting organic forms settle on the canvas with calculated spontaneity, displaying holographic tendencies and shifting perspectives. Seeking to reinvent traditional painting techniques, Dokoupil’s pictures are aesthetically bold and dynamic yet conceptually rigorous.

Jiří Georg Dokoupil was born in Kronov—former Czechoslovaki—in 1954. In 1976 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Cologne and attended classes at the Universities of Frankfurt and New York’s Cooper Union, His work is in the collections of Neue Galerie, Berlin; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Kunstmuseum Horsens, Denmark, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Société General Collection, Paris Migros Museum, Zurich; and Centre Georges Ponpidou, Paris. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.