Written by: Darko Vlahović Photos: Studio Dokoupil
You might not believe this, but I’ve never been to Croatia! All my Czech friends and acquaintances have visited the country at least once… I’m probably the only Czech alive who has never spent his summer holidays in Croatia – the famous painter and conceptual artist Jiří Georg Dokoupil told me when I made a call to his longtime home in Las Palmas on the Canary Islands, where he currently resides.
His residence is just around twenty meters away from the Atlantic and a beach the size of Copacabana, so perhaps it is no wonder that, unlike many of his compatriots, he never felt compelled to visit our coast.
As we are chatting about Czech tourists and the splendour of the Adriatic – with no nod to the dirty Adriatic coast of Italy – Dokoupil lists his monikers across the different countries in which he lived: in his homeland, he was simply Jiří; in Germany, he became famous as Georg, only to go full George in the United States; and in Spain, where he spends most of his time, he is called Jorge, just like in Brazil – only with a different accent.
I add that Croats would probably call him Đuro, or maybe Juraj, which he finds amusing since it reminds him of our shared Slavic heritage.
– Czechs adore Croatia, and they can even understand some Croatian expressions. Many years ago, I decided that I would visit your country, but every time I tried, something got in the way. I am most interested in Zagreb. I’ve seen enough beaches and seas to last a lifetime.
Even though he became one of the most eminent contemporary artists on a global scale, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, did not exactly have his artistic journey lined up – he was more interested in mathematics growing up.
– My first great love was mathematics. I represented my school at the Mathematical Olympiad, and I wanted to become a mathematician one day – he says.
He was born in 1954 in Krnov, a town in the northeastern part of the Czech Republic, into a family with a long line of engineers and inventors, so it was only natural that he also took interest in natural sciences. In Dokoupil’s father’s office, directly above the desk, there was a portrait of an elderly man with a full head of grey hair, which little Jiří thought was his grandfather.
– However, one day I realised that it was not my grandfather, but the grand Albert Einstein – Dokoupil chuckles.
I am trying to figure out when exactly did the scientist in him transform into an artist, but the answer is not so straightforward.
– All my ancestors-engineers had an artistic side as well. For example, my father painted a replica of Matisse’s “Goldfish” that hung in our living room. It was a truly beautiful painting – he says.
Their home welcomed numerous art monographs, and at the tender age of four or five, he already knew who Picasso, Matisse, and Poussin were.
– I often went over the books and copied the drawings. I’ve always enjoyed drawing and felt a strong connection to art, but I didn’t take it very seriously. Mathematics has always seemed far more real to me – he explains.
The turning point in the life of young Jiří Dokoupil came in August 1968, when the troops of the Warsaw Pact countries stormed his native Czechoslovakia to crush the movement of social liberalization known as the Prague Spring. He was only 14 at the time, but he was wise beyond his years. He read a book or two a day, including the works of Karl Marx, and he was well-versed in everything that was going on.
– I paid close attention to all of the developments during the Prague Spring. I noticed that certain actors and artists used ambiguous phrases when talking about communists. Czechs have a great sense of humour, very subtle, similar to English humour, and they used it to express their opposition to communism.
However, even he – a precocious reader of Marx – had no idea what was in store for him. His father, as a prominent inventor, had a private business and got blacklisted as an enemy of the new pro-Soviet regime, so he decided to flee the country with his family and go to Germany.
– We had to leave the country because otherwise my father would have gone missing or got sent to prison. The Prague Spring was not only an intellectual and cultural movement – it was also an incentive for people to start their own companies and do business with the West, and that was one of the things that the communists couldn’t get past – he says.
His parents kept him in the dark about the escape plan until the very last moment.
– I had two hours to pack my things. I had no idea where we were going. It was a few weeks after the arrival of Soviet troops. Chaos reigned and no one actually knew what was going on. We were driving between tanks and it could’ve been fatal, as it was for people who got killed in the crossfire – he recalls.
The border to Austria was open for Czechoslovak refugees during that brief period, but it got closed on the very day his family decided to leave the country. They had to go to Bratislava to obtain an Austrian visa, but everything turned out well in the end.
– Although it was all quite traumatic for me – he says.
His arrival to Germany marked the beginning of an entirely new, refugee stage of his life, but also a period of artistic development that shaped the world-renowned artist Jiří Georg Dokoupil as we know him today.
Since he did not speak German in the beginning, his knowledge of the universal language, that is, mathematics, came in quite handy.
– I would sit at my classroom desk and not understand a word. One time in math class, the teacher was doing a problem on the blackboard, but he made an error. I raised my hand and pointed it out to him, which was my only way to make myself visible in class.
He also started drawing a lot more…
– I’ve always liked to draw, but I started turning to art much more during that time because it gave me an outlet for my emotions. The prevalent one was melancholy. I think melancholy is the right term for what I felt when I came to Germany as a refugee – says Dokoupil.
Of course, he eventually learned German, became Georg, and enrolled at the Fine Art Academy in Cologne. He later studied at Goethe University Frankfurt, and perhaps a watershed period in his artistic development was the year he spent abroad in New York at the prestigious private college The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
– Studying in New York was a turn of the tide for me, shifting me in the direction of conceptual art. I wrote a paper on art styles there. I was wondering what exactly defines a style of art? What does it actually mean?
For Dokoupil, who also studied mathematics in Germany, style turned into a sort of mathematical formula.
– If you take a look at my early work, you’ll notice I had a lot of exhibitions in Europe and the US where I showcased 35 or maybe 40 different styles. Style may thus be defined as combining all the ingredients together, as if in a mathematical formula, and creating a new style out of that.
Perhaps in response to the silence on the other end, he thoughtfully provided me with an additional explanation.
– Let me give you an example. Take Picasso’s Blue Period – which is a straightforward artistic style – and you’ll see it’s actually a mathematical formula beneath the paint. His cubist paintings are also a mathematical formula. My paintings from the Cologne period are also a mathematical formula that I used as a way of painting.
His Cologne period refers to the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties of the last century, when he was a member of the Muelheimer Freiheit artist group, named after the street in Cologne, where their joint studio was situated. Together with Walter Dahn, Peter Boemmels, Gerard Kever, Hans Peter Adamski, and Gerhard Naschberger, he explored new ways of artistic expression using a neo-expressionist, figurative style of intense colourism with traditional themes, in opposition to the prevailing intellectual minimalist language of conceptual art of that time.
He soon started holding solo exhibitions in which he returned to his artistic roots – experimenting with art techniques and styles. Although he never – at least not according to Marcel Duchamp’s notion – developed his unique, distinctive style, Dokoupil is best known for his paintings created using candle flames, tire tracks, lashes, and the fans’ favourite – soap bubbles.
– Those paintings came after I tried my hand at about 120 different styles. In the early nineties, I reached a point in which I realised that any style is attainable if you find a new way of painting. Any absurd activity can help you create a piece of art that looks completely different. The soap bubbles were also the result of my decision to create something that goes beyond conventional painting – he says.
He goes on to explain that there have been many instances in art history where new styles emerged as a result of using new techniques and materials.
– Leonardo da Vinci painted with egg tempera in Verrocchi’s studio. He was very talented and made brilliant paintings, but it was only when the Van Eyck brothers introduced oil paint that he was able to spice up his style. Had he continued to paint with tempera, he would never have been able to develop sfumato. Only oil paints could make it possible for him to achieve that hazy effect in the background.
Dokoupil believes that the introduction of new techniques allows for a shift in the way art is perceived and therefore he himself left conventional painting behind.
– I started painting with candle flames, but also with certain bizarre materials, such as breast milk or semen. I think the late Warhol would approve. He didn’t just make graphics, he also made paintings with urine. He discovered that if you urinate on canvas that has been coated with copper tint, the canvas oxidizes and turns greenish. He was a true genius – claims Dokoupil.
As soon as he mentioned Warhol, he started recalling his time in New York and the city’s art scene in the seventies and eighties, which Dokoupil witnessed firsthand and actively engaged in.
– When I was at Cooper Union, that was actually my confrontation period with conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth and Walter de Maria, as well as Hans Haacke, who was my teacher – although I still think his work from the sixties is amazing.
He crossed paths with Andy Warhol several times, but he did not like to go to his famous studio called The Factory, where various artists, musicians, models, actors, porn stars, drug addicts, free thinkers and a slew of deadbeats, the so-called Warhol superstars, gathered.
– It was a place to be, and everyone was eager to secure an invitation, but my art agent Bruno Bischofberger gave me a heads-up on Warhol. Bruno helped me a lot and became like an uncle to me. He was amazing. He had an exclusive contract with Warhol.
When he mentioned that he also met poor Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York, I asked him if there was any truth to the rumour that he almost died of a cocaine overdose at one of Basquiat’s parties.
– No, no, no, that had absolutely nothing to do with Basquiat! – Dokoupil laughs and immediately continues:
– That had to do with my stay in Brazil. While I was in Rio de Janeiro, I met some bonkers people: artists, actors… You can’t even begin to imagine the kind of parties that went on there. There would be a heap of cocaine in the middle of the table, and everyone would take some. At that time, people were not aware of how big of a problem it could be. That cocaine in Rio was the highest grade I’ve ever seen, and I snorted a lot of it. However, when I returned to New York after that, I went to a club called “Area”. It was a hotspot and it changed the whole interior every month. I got a gram of cocaine from someone there. I went to the toilet and snorted it all at once. Since I got used to the pure cocaine in Rio, good stuff that makes you all chill, when I put this weird New York concoction into my body, it made me go crazy: I lost my cool and started running around. It was a terrible experience…
However, Dokoupil sees that episode in a positive light now since that experience saved him from further temptation of taking drugs.
– I was never a user; in a way, I fell victim to the places I went to, those parties, because everyone in the world of art was doing cocaine. But after that experience in New York, I never touched the stuff again. I learned how to say “no”. That was in 1988, and I haven’t taken anything since. Nada!
Sobriety did not take away from his artistic talent or career prospects later on: from then until today, he has had several hundred solo exhibitions in museums and galleries all around the world, where he displayed his stylistically diverse works, created in the most divergent techniques imaginable. A retrospective look at his oeuvre would resemble a joint exhibition of dozens of different painters.
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Dokoupil continues to explore new and reinterpret old painting techniques with unbridled enthusiasm, creating art that is both completely original and oriented towards tradition, but always independent of the imperatives of contemporary trends. Because of all this, some critics dubbed him an “inventive painter”, a title he has earned fair and square.
As a young artist, he admired Correggio and Poussin; he also copied Picasso’s paintings and thought his Cubist period was “nothing short of brilliant”, especially the works he created in collaboration with Braque. He also loved Matisse for his radical approach to art, and Marcel Duchamp – “not so much for his works as for his philosophy.”
Still, he always had a strong interest in science because of his father.
– I think that art and inventions go hand in hand. Thanks to my father, I have come to admire Thomas Alva Edison greatly. I think artists and inventors deserve equal respect. But Isaac Newton seems more important to me than Picasso. He was like a wizard of sorts.
And indeed, you have to be a wizard of sorts if you want to make a living exclusively from your art as a young, unestablished painter. I ask him how he manages to strike a balance between the commercial aspect of art and the need to hold on to his independence, and if he ever had to “sell out”. I also wondered if money has an adverse effect on art.
– That’s a rather difficult question… – he answers after a long pause.
Then he continues:
– On the one hand, it’s clear as day that you have to sell your art to make a living. On the other hand, I’ve had great luck with real estate since my artistic beginnings. It was like a hobby to me. I would buy an apartment or a studio, then I’d flip it and make a ton of money. I could argue that thanks to that I didn’t even have to sell my paintings at all – he says.
At the moment, Dokoupil has a grand exhibition in Prague; he is also preparing another one in Munich; and next year, as part of the Venice Biennale, he has a large exhibition in store in which his sculptures will also be displayed.
– It’s the usual, nothing special. I have already had so many exhibitions in my life, about 200 or possibly more – I’ve lost count – but certainly a lot. It’s one of the things I do because I see myself as a professional artist. I’m a professional!
Finally, I ask him about his proudest achievement.
– I’m proud to still be working. My fascination with candle and soap bubble paintings can be explained as follows: I know the formula, I know the solution, but the result is still unpredictable and always yields something new. I still get the rush when I create them. if I no longer felt the rush, I would throw away my brush.
