Jirí Dokoupil was born in Krnov, former Czechoslovakia, in 1954. After the invasion of the Soviet army in Prague in 1968, he fled with his family to Germany. Dokoupil was founding-member of the German artist groups Mülheimer Freiheit and Junge Wilde, which arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s; they sought to explore a contemporary expression for their art by using a neo-expressive, figurative style of intensely colourful painting with traditional subjects and by overriding the intellectual, reduced formal language of minimal and conceptual art. Dokoupil developed a less wild, rather unusual method of working and soon found his own radical subjective way with individual considerations. The book presents a selection of over 200 works divided into three sections: Behold, I have become a painter! (1980-1989); A new beginning, but how? (1989-2000) and Suddenly becoming academic (2000-2017).