Leaves of grass 08, 2025

Jiří Dokoupil was born in Krnov, former Czechoslovakia, in 1954. After the invasion of the Soviet army in Prague in 1968, he fled with his family to Germany.

From 1976 to 1978, Dokoupil studied fine arts in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main and in New York at The Cooper Union with the conceptual artist Hans Haacke. Dokoupil was founding-member of the German artist groups Mülheimer Freiheit and Junge Wilde, which arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The group was associated with the legendary art dealer Paul Maenz who organized Dokoupil’s first solo exhibition in Cologne in 1982. In their shared studio in Cologne on a street named Mülheimer Freiheit, the Junge Wilde sought to explore a contemporary expression for their art by using a neo-expressive, figurative style of intensely colorful painting with traditional subjects and by overriding the intellectual, reduced formal language of Minimal and Conceptual Art. Dokoupil also taught as a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Düsseldorf from 1983 to 1984 and in Madrid during 1989.

Dokoupil developed a less wild, rather unusual working method and soon found his own radical subjective way with individual considerations. With his “book painting” shown at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, Dokoupil widely attracted the attention of the art world. Since then-besides the early group exhibitions with the Mülheimer Freiheit-Dokoupil’s work has been seen in numerous one-man shows in galleries, museums and at other cultural sites worldwide.