Jiří Georg Dokoupil - NEW SOAP-BUBBLE PAINTINGS

In the beginning there was a new start. It was around the turn of the year 1987- 1988. Georg had left the hype of the 80s behind and had moved to an island. Letting go of an impressionistic need, he devoted himself to nature and nude drawings and to a large-format painting that had the light play of soap bubbles as its subject. He worked on it for more than a year. After its completion, he realized that it was about more than the painting could do: something new, something unforeseen. He did not want to accept the dictum of simply understood postmodernism that there could be nothing new. The painting emerged from this reluctance, it articulated the ambition to create a unique, singular painting, knowing that it seems impossible, but that for him it is absolutely necessary. The painting showed this nonetheless, this wish that went beyond itself. But it didn‘t satisfy him. Georg realized that he couldn‘t get any further with the means of conventional painting. Other methods had to be invented. Then he had the idea not to paint soap bubbles, but to paint with soap bubbles. A step into pictorial no man‘s land, on the way towards a reinvention of painting.

For more than thirty years, Georg has been refining a method of painting production that incorporates the life of chemical processes that arise when soap bubbles burst on canvas and generate images. The resulting Soap-Bubble Paintings are polyphonic. They change their colors when the incidence of light changes and from viewing angle to viewing angle. A Soap-Bubble Painting is different paintings. Basically, they are composed as unrelated, non- figurative abstractions that try to avoid representation, but as such are open to associations. Occasionally, however, there are also post-non-representational Soap-Bubble Paintings with an almost unambiguous content. For example, a current bubble version of Georg‘s early political painting “Demokratie” (1981), a Soap-Bubble Painting after Wolfgang Tillmans‘ photograph “Man Pissing on a Chair ”(1997) and a cruci xion. - Georg calls the ingredients that characterize the production of the new Soap-Bubble Paintings False Memories and Broken Concepts: broken autonomous, unforeseen paintings. - Georg emphasizes: „Broken Concepts, False Memories and Bubbles without Bubbles!“

Wilfried Dickhoff