Tim Marlow TV - Matthew Collings TV - Jake Chapman - The Art Story online - Offended with Irvine Walsh TV - Artnet online - Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art TV -
Jake and Dinos Chapman ... A vast unrelenting tableau of atrocity. Tim Marlow, Judgement Day: Hell, 2004
The Chapmans’ film is an offshoot from the works they are most notorious for – their children mannequins: hyper-realistic, hyper-horrible. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art II: Shock! Horror! Channel 4 1998
The more shitty, nasty, transgressive the art is, the more it kinds off defines the centrifugal force tolerance of a civilised society. So there’s no crackdown on transgressive art, there’s encouragement of it. Jake Chapman
Jake & Dinos Chapman: Known as Les Enfants Terribles of the British art scene, Dinos and Jake Chapman have been working collaboratively to produce deliberately shocking artwork for the last 30 years. After being employed as assistants to Gilbert & George, the pair found fame as part of the Young British Artists in the 1990s. Along with Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, they were a very significant part of the movement, helping to drive it forward and contributing to its controversial reputation. Working across a range of media, but particularly well-known for their larger installations, their art is full of contradictions; thoughtful investigations of modern issues coexist with puerile humor, sexual obscenity, and graphic violence. In the style of Pop Art, themes are drawn from mass media, but the brothers also acknowledge a debt to artists such as Hieronymus Bosh and Dali as well as the Dada movement.
Many of the brothers’ works have their basis in the art of others, of particular inspiration are the etchings of Goya, which the Chapmans recreated in miniature in Disasters of War (1993) and as a life-size sculpture in Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994). Later, they directly appropriated original artwork, adding to and painting over the etchings of Goya, watercolors by Adolf Hitler, and 18th and 19th century oils.
The Chapmans are known for their incredible attention to detail and this is most noticeable in their miniature apocalyptic landscapes, Hell (2000) and its later recreation Fucking Hell (2008). In these, the brothers created deeply unsettling works that repel the viewer with their content, but must be appreciated for their craftsmanship.
References to the pervasiveness of brand names, consumerism, and globalization feature in much of the Chapmans’s work. Sometimes this is overt as in The Chapman Family Collection (2002), in which Ronald McDonald is presented as an ancient deity, or more subtle such as the inclusion of Nike trainers in many of their sculptural works involving child mannequins.
Along with other members of the YBAs, the Chapmans’ work was often gleefully tasteless and the brothers seemed to set out explore the topics most likely to cause offence, relishing the controversy they created and using it is as a means of self-promotion. This purposeful provocativeness led to accusations of childishness, and worse, that their work was immoral, and even illegal, and shouldn’t be on display to the public.
In a number of their pieces, the brothers have ‘improved’ original works of art by other artists including Adolf Hitler and a range of unknown portrait painters from the 18th and 19th centuries. They also defaced a series of rare prints by Francisco Goya. Their alterations to these works were permanent and in doing this, they committed artistic vandalism, one of the ultimate taboos of the art world. Shocking as these actions are to art historians, the Chapmans have utilized this technique to make comments about violence, the role of art in society, and historical legacy, taking the themes and meanings associated with the original work and inverting or subsuming these into their own ideas. The Art Story online article
In Britain, art has rarely enraged public opinion more than the Sensation exhibition. It propelled the Chapman brothers as part of a superstar generation of British artists to global infamy. Offended by Irvine Walsh, Sky Arts 2020
Jake and Dinos Chapman are a duo of British artists whose shocking, collaborative projects incorporate plastic or fiberglass models to depict gruesome scenes of Nazi soldiers, McDonald’s characters, skeletons, dinosaurs, and other oddities. Their works are reminiscent of both Hieronymus Bosch’s ghoulish scenes of hell and Francisco Goya’s dark parodies of the Spanish government. Born Iakovos (Jake) Chapman in 1966 in Cheltenham, England and Konstantinos (Dinos) Chapman in 1962 in London, England, the Chapman brothers went on to study art. Dinos studied at Ravensbourne College of Art and Jake at North East London Polytechnic; they both attended the Royal College of Art for their master’s degree. The Chapman brothers were shown at one of the first group exhibitions of the YBAs, titled “Brilliant!,” in 1995 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which also including Damien Hist and Tracey Emin. Today, their works can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. Jake Chapman lives in Filkins, United Kingdom and Dinos Chapman lives in Spitalfields, England. Artnet online article
Alongside Myra, the works that caused the most controversy are by brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art III: Fame & Fortune, BBC 2022