Jiří Georg Dokoupil was born in Krnov, Czechoslovakia, in 1954. In 1968 his family fled to West Germany. From 1976 to 1978 he studied at Cologne’s noted art school, the Fachhochschule für Kunst und Design, and at Cooper Union in New York, where he studied under Hans Haacke and Joseph Kosuth. In 1979 he devoted himself to the study of mathematics at the University of Cologne. In 1980 he was a co-founder of the artists’ association Mülheimer Freiheit – named after a street in Cologne – a Rhineland bastion of contemporary figurative painting parallel to those in Berlin and Hamburg. In that period he produced a number of works in collaboration with Walter Dahn. Dokoupil was represented at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. From 1983 to 1984 he taught as a guest professor at Düsseldorf’s art academy, and since 1989 he has held a professorship at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. His oeuvre is characterised by a distinct pluralism of styles. He lives and works in Madrid, Cologne, Prague, Berlin and Santa Cruz, Tenerife.
