Surfeit of styles

It's often been said about Jiří Georg Dokoupil that an exhibition by him appears to be a group show, because of his many different styles. Contrary to what the title might suggest, his current exhibition at the Prague Castle Riding School does not contain 100 works or refer to his age. Rather, that number refers loosely to the number of different styles or techniques the artist has developed and employed over the course of his career.

This survey contains only a handful of those styles, focusing on works created over the past decade. Dokoupil was born in Krnov, Czechoslovakia, in 1954, and after the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 his family fled via Austria to Cologne, Germany (hence the double name, repeating his given Czech name with the German equivalent). When he arrived in Germany at the age of 14, he didn't speak a word of his new country's language. In a documentary playing upstairs in the Riding School's loft (with English subtitles), he says he learned to communicate without words, through art.

Later, Dokoupil would learn to paint without a brush. For this exhibition, the expansive hall has been divided into a series of large rooms with a wide corridor running along the left side. Each room focuses on a different technique or style of brushless paintings, with one or more works from a particular style overlapping into the next room or reappearing at a later point in the exhibition, stressing the continuity he has found in a cycle of continual change. The mainstays of his art are a quest for experimentation and frequent returns to eroticism.

The first works in the show, from the "Movie Paintings" series, are huge pieces that, viewed from a distance, appear to be geometric abstractions, with the canvases covered with colorful horizontal or vertical stripes. In fact, the "stripes" are row upon row of tiny rectangles, each one containing a miniature film still. Each of these inkjet on canvas pictures contains an entire film or television show, including the closing credits. Dokoupil's choices run the gamut from porno flicks to the mainstream James Bond movie Goldfinger to the art-house favorite Un Chien Andalou. Essentially a conceptual gesture, the canvases vary in size according to the length of the films. So the 16-minute Un Chien Andalou measures 210 x 369 cm while the 110-minute Goldfinger spans 420 x 960 cm.

The next room in the exhibition shows a completely different style and technical approach. In Dokoupil's "Soot Paintings" series, for which he is most famous, he modified and expanded on a technique used by his painter friend Robert Cabot. He creates images - usually of commonplace objects like chairs, a doormat, a manhole cover or cobblestones, but also female nudes and animals - by tracing a projected photograph with the burning end of candle on the underside of the canvas. Many of these are remarkably beautiful, achieving a lush chiaroscuro and evocative atmosphere. Dokoupil takes this technique to its heights in large-scale works such as Large Gold Leopard and Train.

Another of his experimental techniques that gets a lot of play in this show, and is just as lovely to look at, is his "Soap Bubble Paintings." These large canvases covered by beautiful bursts and sprays of color were co-composed by the artist and chance, growing out of a simple idea that ended up proving to be a major technical challenge. Dokoupil says he spent a great amount of time working out just how to get pigment-infused soap bubbles to adhere to canvas permanently. He calls them "symphonies in color, conducted by me and fate."

A smaller group of works here are his "Whip Paintings," inspired by the Czech artist Petr Pasterňák, in which he lashes the canvas with a paint-dipped whip. Although they hold the trace of a grand expressive gesture, they fall quite flat, holding little visual interest.

In the documentary film running upstairs, Petr Nedoma, the influential director of Galerie Rudolfinum, which staged a major solo show by Dokoupil in 1996-97, asserts that Dokoupil is one of only three Czech artists of the 20th century who shot off in a entirely new direction, the others being Alfons Mucha and František Kupka.

Dokoupil may not be quite in their league - time will tell, and potentially he could have a few decades of work before him. But one thing is clear: He didn't shoot off in one new direction, but in many, ricocheting from one innovative technique and technical challenge to the next. In some ways, his restless experimentation echoes his nomadic life. Rather than sinking down roots in one place, Dokoupil lives and works in Berlin, Prague, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro.

Like Mucha and Kupka, Dokoupil is a cosmopolitan artist with a keen knack for absorbing international art currents that are "in the air" and adding his own innovations. Mucha made his name in Paris with a gorgeous Art Nouveau style that he later used in the service of Pan-Slavism, and Kupka also soaked up influences of Futurism and Cubism in Paris, turning them into his distinctive Orphist style. Like Mucha and Kupka, Dokoupil found major success abroad in the pluralist Postmodern period, and has returned home to influence local artists.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com