JIRI GEORG DOKOUPIL

After 30 years and for the first time in the Canary Islands, Jiri Georg Dokoupil (Krnov, Czech Republic, 1954) presents approximately 130 drawings, most of which were created during his recent stay in Gran Canaria. These are not minor sketches or auxiliary material: they are the place where insurrection persists in its purest form. The rebellion continues. The rebellion against conceptualism was not a closed chapter in the 1980s; it continues to unfold, page by page, on these walls.

A key figure in contemporary European painting and a prominent member of the Mülheimer Freiheit group, Dokoupil burst onto the international scene with a radical distrust of any orthodoxy. Faced with the dominance of conceptual art, he maintained that painting and drawing remain thinking machines, not relics of an exhausted language. His entire oeuvre has been built on that edge where the idea ceases to be a slogan and becomes a risk once more. The drawings gathered here do not form a series. They function as an open laboratory in which each stroke is a mental experiment, a test of endurance applied to an idea. Dokoupil conceives of them as a verification process: a way to check if an intuition holds up, if it can be transformed into painting, sculpture, or, as he himself states, “into an entire world.” The gallery doesn’t display a result, but rather the nervous system of his practice.

The division into three groups—Memory Drawings, Self-Portraits of Walter Dahn, and Unusual Nudes (Komische Akte)—was established by the artist himself organically and freely, as an artistic gesture and not as a logical structure. In the Memory Drawings, Dokoupil draws with his eyes closed, allowing his hand to think before his mind. The Self-Portraits of Walter Dahn reactivate, through the face of a friend and accomplice from his youth, an entire shared era. In the Unusual Nudes, the body becomes a stage for humor, irony, and desire, without asking permission or offering apologies.

Hanging close together, occupying the space like a continuous current, these drawings compose a cartography of thought in motion. There are no hierarchies: the minimal coexists with the excessive, the precise with the clumsy, the intimate with the grotesque. Dokoupil doesn’t seek a style that represents him, but rather a state of freedom that allows him to keep experimenting, keep contradicting himself, keep beginning. In the artist’s own words, “during the eighties, the only thing forbidden was forbidding.” The echo of that phrase resonates throughout the exhibition. The rebellion continues each time a sheet of paper becomes the place where an idea dares to appear without asking permission from any theory.