JIRI GEORG DOKOUPIL (CZECH B. 1954)
Buddha
signed and dated Dokupil / 1994 (on the reverse)
soot painting on board
25 x 20.5 cm
unframed
ARR

Provenance:
Gifted to the present owner by the artist
Private collection, Suzanne Trimble, AKA the artist Suzanne Bella Land who witnessed its creation.

This work is one of the soot paintings Dokoupil created in the mid '90's interpreting various ancient depictions of Buddha's face. The asymmetric shape of this fascinating work is anomalous, due to having caught fire and Dokoupil having made use of the burning process within his creative technique to arrive at the resulting enigmatic form.

In 1989 he began a series of soot paintings, using the flame of a candle as a paintbrush to depict figures such as Jesus Christ. Dokoupil has also experimented with using a whip as paintbrush, and has incorporated other unconventional materials such as liquid soap and rolling tires into his work.

Dokoupil was born in Krnov, then Czechoslovakia, in 1954. After the invasion of the Soviet army in Prague in 1968, he escaped with his family over Austria to Germany. In 1976 he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cologne.

Dokoupil's work confronts issues of artistic style and, in doing so, deliberately attempts to avoid having any sort of singular aesthetic. Rather, Dokoupil has developed a catalogued body of more than 100 different styles and techniques that he chooses from in a systematized approach that removes notions of distinctive, personal expression.

Unlike painters who traditionally sought to develop a unique signature aesthetic to their work, there is little discernible stylistic consistency to much of Dokoupil's oeuvre. For this reason, he is often regarded as the ultimate post-modern artist whose work combines a vast mêlée of sources and styles from Abstract Expressionism to Pop. Within his broad body of work, which often finds inspiration in a simple everyday object or single colour, Dokoupil's work challenges the mythical concept and foundations of much avant garde art, which by the early 1980s had become increasingly distanced from everyday life.

In 1979 Dokoupil founded the group Mülheimer Freiheit with artists such as Gerhard Naschberger, Hans Peter Adamski, Gerard Kever, Peter Bömmels and Walter Dahn. The group was associated with the art dealer Paul Maenz who organised Dokoupil‘s first solo exhibition in 1982. In their shared studio in Cologne on a street named Mülheimer Freiheit, the six Jungen Wilden sought to explore a contemporary expression for their art by using a neoexpressive, figurative style of intensely colourful painting with traditional subjects and by overriding the intellectual, reduced formal language of Minimal and Conceptual Art.