Jirí Georg Dokoupil was born on June 3, 1954 in Krnov (now Czech Republic). After the violent ending of the Prague Spring in 1968, the family moved to Germany. He graduated from high school and then studied art from 1976 to 1978 in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, and in New York at Cooper Union, where German Conceptualist Hans Haacke was one of his teachers. Dokoupil lives and works in Berlin, Madrid, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro.

Dokoupil works conceptually and does not adhere to a particular style. Instead, he paraphrases different preceding styles, plays with them and incessantly invents new techniques with which he experiments extensively. His oeuvre today contains over 60 so-called series and far more than 100 devised techniques or styles.

In 1988 he started to develop the technique of the „Soot Paintings“, made with the soot of a burning candle from projected images while the canvas is hanging flat from the ceiling. The Soot Paintings contain different series to which the „Arrugadic Jesus Paintings“ (right side) belong, though for Dokoupil „Arrugadism” (Span. arrugado = crinkled, wrinkled) is an attempt to fragment the figure of the original image and reassemble it again