Modern & Contemporary Art

Modern & Contemporary Art

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 67. Trommler (Portrait von Walter Dahn) (Drummer (Portrait of Walter Dahn)).

Property from a Private Collection, Frankfurt

Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Trommler (Portrait von Walter Dahn) (Drummer (Portrait of Walter Dahn))

Lot Closed

September 17, 11:00 AM GMT

Estimate

6,000 - 8,000 EUR

Lot Details

Description

Jiri Georg Dokoupil

b. 1954

Trommler (Portrait von Walter Dahn)

(Drummer (Portrait of Walter Dahn))

signed, titled, dated 19.5.1983 and 1983, dedicated für Michael and inscribed on the reverse

oil on canvas

100 by 100 cm., 39¼by 39¼ in.

Framed: 102.5 by 102.5 cm., 40¼ by 40¼ in.

Galerie Karl Pfefferle, Munich

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Jiří Georg Dokoupil is a founding member of the Cologne Neue Wilde art collective which also became known as the painters of the Mülheimer Freitheit, because they exhibited in a studio they shared under the address Mülheimer Freiheit 110 in Cologne-Mülheim. The group arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s and comprised of many important German artists. Like other neo-expressionist movements, such as, Figuration Libre in France, the Neue Wilde sought after a new way of expression as they were opposed to minimalism and conceptualism. Along Dokoupil another founding member of the Neue Wilde, which split up in 1982, was the German artist Walter Dahn, with whom he shared a long friendship.


This work of Dokoupil depicting Walter Dahn as a nude drummer was executed in 1983 during a time when both were visiting professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. They produced works for several international exhibitions as they were rising protagonists of the neo-expressionist art movement in Europe. During this time of close collaborations, the two artists portrayed each other repeatedly. In this work Dokoupil applies the embodied topic of a drummer, who musters people together before an important event is announced. In 1983 we can trace Dokoupil experimenting with square canvases in the same size as the present works canvas, producing a group of paintings that all share a similar geometrical composition. All of which ae abstract works that depict an inscribed circle filling the square canvas as a polygon and within this circle there is a cross. For Der Trommler Dokoupil makes use of such a polygon, but instead of an abstraction he places the nude Walter Dahn whilst drumming in the center. Depicting Dahns elongated body in front view it mimics the same shape as the cross in the abstract compositions produced in the same year.