JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN

Born 1966 (Jake Chapman) and 1962 (Dinos Chapman) in Cheltenham, England (Jake) and London, England (Dinos). Lives and works in London (Both).

Jake and Dinos Chapman, Migraine, 2009, cardboard, paste board, newspaper, glue, polystyrene, posterpaint, 20 x 24 x 24 cm. Copyright © the artists. Photo: Jochen Littkeman. Courtesy White Cube, London and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

Jake and Dinos Chapman make iconoclastic sculptures, paintings, prints and large-scale installations that draw on confrontational imagery to question standards of politics, political correctness and obscenity in a witty and, at times, shocking way.

The Chapman brothers studied at the Royal College of Art (RCA), while they also worked as assistants to British artists Gilbert and George. In the early 1990s, they began to collaborate, often using plastic models or fibreglass. They quickly became known for their uncomfortably realistic, mannequin-like models of mutant children and adults with genitalia in place of their noses and mouths. They have also re-imagined horrific historical scenes of mass torture and disfigurement as if they were children’s toys or other bland products of mass culture. These don’t stop at being backhanded comments on the anaesthetising effects of the pervasive violence throughout contemporary society, but attempt to re-appropriate and make real again the horror of the original events by representing them subversively and paradoxically in ways and formats that obviously relate to widely shared fantasies. They have based works on such iconic historical works as Francisco Goya’s etchings The Disasters of War (1993), and in Hell (1998–2000) have fantastically embellished scenes from the Nazi Holocaust and the Second World War in large tableaux of torture and mayhem that look like agglomerations of small collectable plastic children’s toys. ‘The Chapman Family Collection’ (2002) takes a different tack. It is a key series of adulterated, faux-ethnographic objects produced in Nigeria by contemporary sculptors and embellished by the Chapmans; supposedly they have been collected by the Chapman family over generations. Traditional ‘African’ forms have been mixed with the advertising iconography and characters of the McDonald’s Corporation to create a pointedly sardonic and dislocated statement on both the grotesqueness of globalisation and the European fetishisation of the ‘primitive’.

For the 17th Biennale of Sydney, the artists will be presenting ‘Shitrospective’ (2009), a retrospective display of highlights from their work since the early 1990s. Made out of paint, glue and cardboard these ‘crap versions’ of previous works are represented here in miniature, schematic, form – as a kind of ‘primitive’ branding that echoes the reflexive machinery of both the art market and consumerist capitalism. One of these works is a mini version of ‘The Chapman Family Collection’ – trophies gleaned from exotic locations and destroyed paradises that also bear the infamous stamp of globalisation – McDonald’s branding. Others works revisit such larger well-known works as Bring Me the Head of Franco Tosselli (2009) and Two Faced Cunt (1995) in which the prominent features of children and adults were mutated into genitalia.

Parodying children’s art, ethnographic art, modernist spirituality and the legacy of pop art, these highly charged works are signifiers of a global malaise. The artists address the intersection of the art market and industrial colonialism with vernacular, primitive and tribal art in politically charged works that imbibe/invoke/ celebrate the raw power of popular, ritualistic and traditional cultures as the West continues to consume everything around it.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2008 ‘Memento Moronika’, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany
2007 ‘When Humans Walked the Earth’, Tate Britain, London, UK
2006 ‘Bad Art for Bad People’, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
2006 ‘Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs’, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria
2003 ‘Jake & Dinos Chapman’, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Another Mythology’, National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
2008 ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’, The Hayward Gallery, London, UK
2007 ‘Summer Exhibition 2007’, Annenberg Courtyard, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
2005 ‘ARS 06 – Sense of the Real’, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
2003 ‘The Turner Prize’, Tate Britain, London, UK

Selected Bibliography

Simon Baker, Jake & Dinos Chapman: Like a dog returns to its vomit, Jay Jopling and White Cube, London, 2005
Simon Baker, Robin Mackay and Rod Mengham, Jake and Dinos Chapman: Fucking Hell, Jay Jopling and White Cube, London, 2008
Fernando Frances and Matthew Collings, Jake & Dinos Chapman: The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, CAC Malaga, Malaga, 2004
E. Schneider, J. Chapman, J. Hall and R. Sagmeister, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, 2005
Kristin Schrader and Jake Chapman, Memento Moronika, Kestnergesellschaft and Walther König, Cologne, 2008