The exhibition of the world-renowned artist Jiří Georg Dokoupil will feature not only his legendary soap bubble paintings, but also one of his most recent projects – Furniture For Fotos.
In the early 1980s Dokoupil was a prominent member of Mülheimer Freiheit, the German Neo Expressionist group, which he founded with five other artists. His participation in Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 catapulted him to stardom. He went on to present his work at international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennales (1987, 1993), the galleries of Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend and David Zwirner in New York, as well as Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK) in Vienna, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. His paintings can be found in collections of respected artistic institutions and in prominent private collections throughout the world.
Dokoupil has developed an unusual new technique without the use of brushes or oil paints. He has developed approximately one hundred various techniques and a fascinating spectrum of art expression forms. He also continues to improve his soap bubble painting style which he created in 1992.
After his world premiere at the DSC Gallery in Prague in the spring of this year, he will present a new artistic technique to the spectators in Slovakia. As he sees it, “This is the most realistic evidence of the theory of Marcel Duchamp, who says that a work of art exists only when the spectator has looked at it. The objects themselves do not mean anything until the viewer becomes part of the statue itself.” For this, Dokoupil created special objects that blur the difference between the second and third dimensions. And visitors will be able to be photographed with these objects.
"Duchamp scares me, I’ve been fighting with him all my life. He was the worst painter of all time," says the artist, who is famous for his iconic bubble paintings and other artistic innovations, constantly inspired by new techniques. "Seven years ago I had a dream that the second dimension decided to transform itself into the third dimension, but somehow it didn‘t work out," he says about the exhibition.
Now it is definitely certain that the word “FuFoFo”, which the artist himself used to describe the exhibition, is a particularly apt acronym composed of the first letters of the name Furniture For Fotos.
Jiří Georg Dokoupil was born in Krnov in 1954. In 1968, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the 1970s. He also attended classes at the University of Frankfurt and at Cooper Union in New York, where he studied under the German conceptual artist Hans Haacke, whose impact on his early work was significant. Dokoupil was a guest professor at Kunstacademie in Düsseldorf from 1983 to 1984, at Circulo de Ballas Artes in Madrid in 1989 and at Gesamtschule Kassel from 1994 to 1995. In 2012, he won the Lovis-Corinth Award. He lives and works in Berlin, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Prague.
