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.