Curated by Robert Fleck

Why does the present wave of figuration in oil from Germany seem like déjà vu or perhaps even a bad joke? Because it was just two decades ago that Jiří Georg Dokoupil and the other members of Mülheimer Freiheit were said to have reinvented the medium in exactly the same way, prompting exactly the same enthusiasm from naive writers and, more important, the market. The extent of Dokoupil’s artistic weight should be readily apparent in this exhibition of some two hundred works from the past twenty-four years (many of which will make their premiere in Hamburg). The accompanying catalogue includes essays by, among others, Thomas Hoppe and Slavoj Žižek.

Travels to the National Gallery, Prague, 2006.

— Daniel Birnbaum