Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You think you know contemporary art because you’ve read three exhibition catalogs and visited the last Venice Biennale? Let me introduce you to Jiří Georg Dokoupil, this elusive artist who, for several decades, has been taunting critics, confusing collectors and defying all categorization with jubilant insolence.
Born in 1954 in communist Czechoslovakia, Dokoupil is a child of exile. Following the Soviet invasion of 1968, his family fled to West Germany. This forced uprooting may have given him the extraordinary ability to never settle into a single style. Since his beginnings with the Mülheimer Freiheit group in the early 1980s, Dokoupil has cultivated a radically nomadic approach to creation. He has developed more than sixty series, invented more than a hundred pictorial techniques, and now lives between Berlin, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Prague, Plovdiv and Las Palmas. An artistic vagabond who obstinately refuses the label of personal style that the art market demands so insistently.
Dokoupil’s artistic trajectory strangely resembles the journey of the main character in Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. Like Tomas, he seems tormented by this existential dilemma: does life have value only in its multiplicity of experiences or in its fidelity to a single path? Dokoupil’s answer is clear: better to explore incessantly than to be confined to a recognizable signature. ‘I am in search of the power to constantly create new things, to discover new perspectives,’ he confesses. ‘I am interested in working with breaks and contradictions. We do not want a new style or a new direction’ [1].
Dokoupil practices what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call a permanent ‘line of flight’, a stubborn refusal to be territorialized. His practice is akin to a conceptual nomadism that thwarts market expectations and art history classifications. Take his famous ‘Soap Bubble Paintings’, a series he has been developing since 1992. Dokoupil mixes pigments with soapy water, blows bubbles that he bursts onto the canvas, thus creating organic shapes with vibrant colors. The result is breathtaking: microscopic galaxies, cellular universes that seem to pulse with life. These works transport us simultaneously into the infinitely small and the infinitely large, as if Dokoupil had captured the Big Bang in a soap bubble.
‘I mix soap with pigment, then blow bubbles that I burst onto the canvas,’ he explains with deceptive simplicity. ‘You could say that chemistry produces images’ [2]. This approach recalls the experiments of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who stuck butterfly wings and dried leaves directly onto the film to create psychedelic visual explosions. Like Brakhage, Dokoupil explores the limits of his medium by integrating natural and random processes into his practice.
In recent years, Dokoupil has begun to incorporate pearlescent paints used for cars into his bubble compositions. The resulting surfaces change appearance depending on the angle and light, continually metamorphosing the work. This kinetic dimension transforms the spectator into an active participant. The work only exists fully in this dynamic relationship between the changing surface and the visitor’s mobile gaze.
This approach evokes certain theories of experimental cinema, where direct perception takes precedence over narration. As Gene Youngblood wrote in ‘Expanded Cinema’ (1970), ‘art is not something you appreciate, but a state of being you experience’. Dokoupil’s bubble paintings perfectly embody this conception: they represent nothing, they are pure visual events.
But reducing Dokoupil to his bubble paintings alone would be a monumental mistake. The artist has invented countless techniques, each more surprising than the last. His ‘Soot Paintings’ are created by holding a candle under a canvas suspended from the ceiling, the flame blackening the surface according to a projected image. With an ironic twist, Dokoupil transforms a process of destruction (combustion) into a creative act.
In his ‘Tire Paintings’, he rolls paint-coated tires over canvases, creating tracks that evoke highways seen from the sky or automatic writing. With his ‘Whip Paintings’, he projects paint onto the canvas using a cowboy whip, combining the gesturality of abstract expressionism with a quasi-sadomasochistic performance dimension.
His ‘Mother’s Milk Paintings’ series pushes experimentation even further: Dokoupil paints with breast milk on canvas, then cooks the surface until the milk caramelizes. The result evokes ancient maps, parchments yellowed by time. This pictorial alchemy transforms a nourishing substance into a work of art, playing on the symbolic connotations of breast milk while exploring its chemical properties.
In 2024, for his exhibition ‘Venetian Bubbles’ at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, Dokoupil crossed a new frontier by creating his first glass sculptures, three-dimensional extensions of his bubble paintings. Seven metal structures in the shape of bottle racks are adorned with crystal bubbles of various hues, capturing the ephemeral moment when a bubble reaches its fullness before bursting. ‘Through this, Dokoupil defies the impossible: preserving the beauty of a soap bubble at its peak, frozen in time,’ notes a critic [3].
This obsession with the transmutation of matter is not unlike the research of medieval alchemists. Like them, Dokoupil seeks to transform ordinary substances into visual gold. But unlike the alchemists who pursued a single goal (the philosopher’s stone), Dokoupil multiplies the paths of exploration, refusing to be confined to a single quest. His practice is that of a heretical alchemist who does not believe in the definitive solution, but in the infinite proliferation of experiments.
This alchemical dimension of his work brings us back to the concept of bricolage developed by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The bricoleur, according to Lévi-Strauss, is the one who works with ‘the means at hand’, using heterogeneous tools and materials to solve practical problems. Unlike the engineer who designs coherent systems, the bricoleur improvises and adapts. Dokoupil is precisely this type of artist: a genius bricoleur who diverts everyday materials to create stunning images.
This approach is particularly evident in his ‘Arrugadist Paintings’ series, inspired by the wrinkled potatoes (papas arrugadas) typical of the Canary Islands. Dokoupil applies paint to a surface that he deliberately allows to crack as it dries, creating textures that evoke flaky skins. This process transforms a technical imperfection (cracking) into an aesthetic principle, reversing the traditional values of painting.
Art critic Rainer Crone pertinently noted this dimension of Dokoupil’s work: ‘I suggest that the last of these mentioned paintings, as well as the more direct, rather more striking and more insistent painting entitled ‘Die unheilbare Metamorphose des russichen Volke’ (The Incurable Metamorphosis of the Russian People), are the direct results of the imposition of martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981′ [4]. This observation reveals the underlying political dimension of Dokoupil’s work, generally masked by his formal experiments.
But this political reading does not exhaust the meaning of the work. Dokoupil himself maintains an ambiguous relationship with the interpretation of his work. ‘I often cite art history in response to a momentary need. I use it as if it were a found conventional language. In this regard, my interests are very volatile. I slip into another role and that’s what I am then,’ he states [5]. This identity fluidity recalls the concept of ‘masquerade’ developed by feminist theorist Joan Riviere, for whom identity is never more than a performance, a role that one temporarily assumes.
Dokoupil’s attitude towards art history is both reverential and irreverent. He intimately knows the codes and references, but manipulates them with insolent freedom. As when he presented at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 a work entitled ‘God, show me your balls’, an ironic homage to Julian Schnabel’s paintings composed of broken plates. Schnabel not having been invited to this edition of the Documenta, Dokoupil deliberately copied his style to allow him to be ‘present’ despite his absence.
This anecdote reveals the deeply subversive dimension of Dokoupil’s work. He does not merely challenge aesthetic conventions, he questions the very notion of authorship and originality. In an artistic context obsessed with signature and recognizable style, Dokoupil proposes a practice based on perpetual metamorphosis. ‘Nothing is more boring than continually playing Napoleon,’ he declares [6]. This phrase perfectly sums up his philosophy: better to explore multiple artistic identities than to be confined to a single role.
This chameleonic approach is not without posing problems for art dealers and collectors. The artist tells how Mary Boone, after exhibiting him with enthusiasm, turned away from him when he radically changed style. Even Leo Castelli, legendary for his open-mindedness, eventually grew tired of his incessant metamorphoses. Only Bruno Bischofberger, the historic dealer of Andy Warhol, remained faithful to Dokoupil for decades, understanding the paradoxical coherence of his incoherence.
But this stylistic freedom comes at a price. Unlike his contemporaries such as Julian Schnabel or Anselm Kiefer, Dokoupil has never been fully integrated into the pantheon of contemporary art. His resistance to categorization has made him difficult to ‘sell’ as a coherent brand. As critic Morgan Falconer noted: ‘One of the main accusations against him has always been that he lacks substance and seriousness’ [7].
This accusation is profoundly unjust. Dokoupil’s apparent lightness masks a deep reflection on the conditions of art production in the postmodern era. His multifaceted practice questions the notions of authenticity, originality and artistic authority that the market takes for granted. In this sense, he is less a frivolous artist than a visual thinker who has understood that the best way to criticize the system is to continually outsmart it.
His stance recalls that of the dandies of the 19th century, those figures who made their very lives a work of art. As Charles Baudelaire wrote: ‘Dandyism is not even, as many unreflective people seem to believe, an immoderate taste for clothing and material elegance. These things are for the perfect dandy only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind’.
Dokoupil has transposed this attitude into the field of contemporary art. His multiple residences, his improbable techniques, his contradictory styles are the manifestations of an aristocratic freedom of the spirit that refuses the constraints of the market and the categorizations of art history.
Jiří Georg Dokoupil’s major contribution to contemporary art perhaps lies less in his technical innovations, as impressive as they are, than in his ability to maintain creative freedom in an increasingly standardized system. At a time when artists are encouraged to develop a ‘recognizable brand’, Dokoupil reminds us that true art often arises from rupture and contradiction.
In the artist’s own words: ‘I see art history in a totally distorted way. I can’t help it, but for me, it is a materialist history of many rational inventions’ [8]. This ‘distorted’ vision is precisely what makes Dokoupil unique. He does not contemplate art history with reverence, but manipulates it as a malleable material, freely drawing from it to fuel his experiments.
So, the next time you come across one of his works in a museum or gallery, do not try to attach it to a specific movement or style. Instead, accept being disconcerted, surprised, perhaps even irritated. For it is precisely in this zone of discomfort that Dokoupil operates, reminding us that art worthy of the name should always destabilize us, never comfort us in our certainties.
Like the soap bubbles he bursts onto his canvases, Dokoupil’s work is both ephemeral and persistent, playful and profound, simple and complex. It captures the very essence of our era: unstable, changing, refusing any fixed definition. A work that, like its creator, prefers perpetual metamorphosis to the reassuring stagnation of style.
- Dokoupil, in ‘Deutsche Kunst, hier heute’ (interview with Wolfgang Max Faust), in Kunstforum, December 1981 / January 1982.
- Jiří Georg Dokoupil in an interview for Frame Web, 2015.
- The Ephemeral Captured in Bubbles’, Market Art Fair, April 2025.
- Rainer Crone, ‘Jiri Georg Dokoupil: The Imprisoned Brain’, Artforum, March 1983, vol. 21, no. 7.
- Dokoupil, in ‘Deutsche Kunst, hier heute’ (interview with Wolfgang Max Faust), in Kunstforum, December 1981 / January 1982.
- Interview with Jiří Georg Dokoupil by Cornelius Tittel, 032c Magazine, August 2012.
- Morgan Falconer, ‘Jiri Georg Dokoupil’, Frieze, November 11, 2002.
- Interview with Jiří Georg Dokoupil by Cornelius Tittel, 032c Magazine, August 2012.
