SOOT PAINTINGS: AN ESSENTIAL CONSTANT IN JIRI 
GEORG DOKOUPIL´S WORK.

Inside the overall set of Jiri Georg Dokoupil’s varied and prolific production (Krnov, 
1954), our aim is to show that his Soot series is the most important of the 42 series 
developed by the artist up to the present day, not only due to the amount of artworks but 
also its constant evolution and development over the years. It has remained active from 
1989 until the present.

In order to justify the truth of this statement, with all due respect, we will discredit the 
voices of the critics -or academicians in general- who, confused by the extraordinary 
stylistic diversity of Dokoupil, accuse him of lacking rigor, coherence and order.

For this purpose, we have assembled a complete and updated catalog of this series, 
with an analysis of its characteristics and the variations of its development, with a 
comparative study of the soot paintings’ relationship with the other series and in general, 
the relations between Dokoupil’s work and other artists who have used this technique.

Necessarily before undertaking this task and as an approximation, we conducted a 
study of the technique used, the fumage: its nature and characteristics, implementation 
tools and artistic possibilities, as well as an extensive sample of the artists who have 
used it without any type of chronological or geographical restriction, since its discovery 
in 1937 by Wolfgang Paalen.

As an annex, we include the complete catalog of the paintings which the author of this 
study created with this technique between 1994 and 1999.