Jiri Georg Dokoupil's Soap Bubble Paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Jiri Georg Dokoupil's exhibition 'New Paintings' ran from January 8 to February 7, 2015 at Paul Kasmin Gallery's Chelsea location at 515 W. 27th Street in New York. The show featured his innovative soap bubble paintings, a technique he developed in the early 1990s by applying metallic pigments and diamond dust to soap-lye solutions, allowing the forms to settle on canvas. These works, with bubbles measuring up to a foot and a half across, glow in pale colors against absorbent black backgrounds, creating permanent captures of transient effects. The largest paintings reach three meters square, resembling abstract or representational images of unfamiliar subjects. The gallery's skylit space enhanced the viewing experience, visible from the street through glass walls. Dokoupil's method expands art-making techniques, echoing historical practices like frescoes, oil painting, and modernist approaches such as Morris Louis's poured acrylics and Andy Warhol's silkscreens. The paintings evoke Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's 1733-1735 work 'Soap Bubbles', which depicts a children's game, highlighting themes of fleeting beauty. The exhibition underscores contemporary art's capacity to transform ephemeral visual pleasures into lasting artworks.