Interferenz Bubbles - Jiří Georg Dokoupil
Images of the Exhibition
Description
With the exhibition “Interferenz Bubbles,” Galerie Wolfgang Jahn in Munich presents a premiere in the artistic work of Jiří Georg Dokoupil. Alongside a curated selection of his well-known soot and soap bubble paintings, the artist is showcasing a completely new series of sculptural soap bubble works to the public for the first time. These are expansive structures composed of glass ovals and spheres arranged around a metal framework.
Jiří Georg Dokoupil is a painter who doesn’t paint in the traditional sense. Rather, he is an artist who consistently thinks outside the box, questions conventions and norms, and experiments with new forms of expression until he masters them to perfection. Instead of brushes and spatulas, since the mid-1980s, he has employed burning candles or soap solutions mixed with pigments, which he bursts as soap bubbles onto the surface of his works—a method of paint application that has become his signature. In his now-famous Soap Bubble Paintings, the motif is derived directly from the technique: the pigment-soaked soap bubble, a light, translucent, shimmering form, bursts on the canvas under the artist’s guidance, imprinting itself onto the surface. The fragile and ephemeral is immortalized in the very moment of its destruction. This process completely avoids mimesis—the representational imitation of nature—which is typically central to the medium of painting.
Dokoupil’s soap bubble works are usually vibrant and iridescent. They are created from a multitude of floating, round and oval-shaped forms, overlapping and intersecting in an all-over composition. The shimmering bubbles are characterized by marbled streaks of color that create a mesmerizing interplay of hues. The exhibition title “Interferenz Bubbles” refers to these distinctive interference colors, which occur when white light refracts on the thin surface of a bubble and splits into its spectral range.
The layered and overlapping compositions and the varied appearances and orientations of the organically luminous forms generate a dynamic energy on the canvas, reminiscent at times of the restless motion of a rippling water surface. Dokoupil’s bubbles appear to pulse and vibrate like oxygen bubbles, even to breathe. One gets the impression they might contract and expand. They evoke living, changing forms—instinctively associated with cells, amoebas, or blood corpuscles.
Some compositions are lively and frenetic, while others convey calm and contemplation—especially those in which solitary bubbles rise against a dark background. Here, one might feel as though gazing into an aquarium, revealing a mesmerizing underwater world of jellyfish-like creatures.
In his newest body of work, Dokoupil brings the soap bubble back from the two-dimensional plane into three-dimensional space. To express the fragility and fleeting nature of bubbles, he uses glass—a material that is likewise delicate and transparent. Mounted on a metal structure—deliberately reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s famous Bottle Rack readymade—his hand-blown, shimmering glass forms are arranged like an abstract bouquet. Like real soap bubbles, these glass objects are not always perfectly round; some are elongated, slightly misshapen, or exhibit pressure marks, voids, and indentations that give each form a unique sculptural language. Their spatial arrangement produces an intriguing interplay of light and color, reminiscent of the layered, overlapping effects in his paintings.
A particularly notable piece within this new series is one in which the glass objects are presented inside a Plexiglas cube filled with a small amount of water. This work is a tribute to Dokoupil’s teacher Hans Haacke, whose Condensation Cube (1965, in the collection of MACBA, Barcelona) similarly involves a water-filled Plexiglas cube. Haacke's piece reflects the natural water cycle and responds to environmental factors like light, air currents, and temperature, resulting in condensation and the formation of air bubbles—forms as fleeting and intangible as soap bubbles.
In his Soot Paintings series, depictions of wild leopards serve as the central motif. These works begin with color-primed canvases onto which the animal forms are projected using light. Dokoupil then works from above, holding a candle that produces soot upon contact with the canvas. With this technique, he meticulously imitates the distinctive spotted patterns of the graceful animals, forming contours and background structures through expert handling of the soot. The effect is striking: the big cats gradually emerge from their typically dark backgrounds, visible only upon closer inspection—an uncanny, almost startling experience, as though suddenly coming face to face with the predator. The dancing flame of the candle—symbolic of something primal and untamed—naturally results in fluctuating, imprecise marks, creating a flickering, dynamic texture akin to motion blur in photography. Dokoupil’s leopard paintings are not frozen photographic moments but rather a visual embodiment of vitality and constant transformation—just like his soap bubbles, which seem to live and breathe upon the static surface of the canvas.
Dr. Veit Ziegelmaier
