JIRI GEORG DOKOUPI
2015-02-02Comprised 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.
Opposite – Pokupis, 2014
Exhibition runs through to February 7th, 2015
Paul Kasmin Gallery
515 West 27th Street
New York
NY 10001
