DOKOUPIL: Man Ray Picabia Richter and Bond - James Bond

Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jiri Georg Dokoupil, one of the most creative and interesting artists of his generation. Born in Krnow (Czechoslovakia) in 1954, Dokoupil and his family moved to Germany in 1968. He studied art in Cologne, Frankfurt and New York, and currently works between Berlin, Madrid, Prague and Rio de Janeiro.

This is the first exhibition of Dokoupil’s work to be held in London since the 1980s, and Ben Brown is very excited at the opportunity to show the work of such a seminal artist in the new space at 12 Brook’s Mews.

In the early 1980s Dokoupil emerged as a leading champion of a new generation of international artists who, in opposition to the minimal and conceptual art of the 1970s, rediscovered painting and the use of figurative, expressionist images. In America artists such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Jean Michel Basquiat championed figurative painting and in Italy the Transavanguardia, which held emotion and human imagination above rational principles, emerged to challenge Arte Povera. In Germany, the Műlheimer Freiheit group, which Dokoupil briefly was part of, explored the contemporary expression of traditional figurative styles in intensely colourful paintings, whose roots could be found in Dada and Surrealism.