Die zehn Künstler an die ich am 3. Mai 1990 um 19.00 Uhr gedacht habe (The ten artists which came to my mind at 7 p.m on May 3, 1990) curated by the first artist invited to curate an exhibition at Witte de With, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, included some of his own works as well as drawings, paintings and photographs by Roberto Cabot, David Deutsch, Robert Greene, Otto Mühl, Joan Nelson, Andres Serrano, Antonin Strizek, Alice Stepanek / Steven Maslin and Victor Pivovarov.
Each year, since its inception in 1990, Witte de With has invited an artist to curate an exhibition. Witte de With encourages each guest curator to develop his project according to his own personal choices so that the resulting exhibition offers the audience another vision, independent of the center’s own program.
The first artist invited to curate an exhibition at Witte de With was Jiri Georg Dokoupil (1954). Dokoupil’s exhibition entitled Die zehn Künstler an die ich am 3. Mai 1990 um 19.00 Uhr gedacht habe (The ten artists which came to my mind at 7 p.m on 3 May 1990) included some of his own works as well as drawings, paintings and photographs by Roberto Cabot (1963), David Deutsch (1943), Robert Greene (1953), Otto Mühl (1925), Joan Nelson (1958), Andres Serrano (1950), Antonin Strizek (1959), Alice Stepanek (1954) / Steven Maslin (1959), and Victor Pivovarov (1937).
In spite of their completely different backgrounds, Dokoupil brought these artists together because of their common use of reality as a point of departure and their reference to the traditional genres of the landscape and interior. In contemporary art, working after nature, according to Dokoupil, is going against the laws, playing with them, exaggerating them and changing them. By presenting contemporary landscapes and interiors, the exhibition explored the status of representation as a subjective processing of “reality.”