Jiří Georg Dokoupil is a famous painter despite his insistence that he can’t paint. In vain he once tried to paint like a proper Impressionist. After working at it for more than a year, he simply gave up. Even at that time, though, he already had a reputation as a painter. As part of the Cologne-based group Mühlheimer Freiheit—which at the beginning of the ’80s took to the paintbrush in protest against rigid Minimalism and intellectual Conceptualism—he gained international renown. This was at a time when most progressive thinkers were of the opinion that painting was dead.

But