Jiří Georg Dokoupil

A presence on New York's art scene during the ’80s, this Czech-born German painter hasn't shown here in 20 years—an absence this show remedies. Dokoupil was one of the founders of Cologne's Junge Wilde ("Wild Youth") of the late 1970s, a group who, like the Pictures Generation, rejected the austerity of Minimal and Conceptual Art. Interestingly, Dokoupil's approach wasn't entirely dissimilar to Postminimalism's process approach. He'd suspend canvases from the ceiling, using soot rising from burning candles to render photo-based subjects. Similarly, he used soap mixed with pigment to blow colored bubbles onto canvas, popping them to leave gossamer forms that oddly resembled condoms or jellylike creatures from the deep ocean. The latest iterations of the latter are on view here.