Jake and Dinos Chapman - Fucking Hell - 2008

Jake And Dinos Chapman - Fucking Hell

Harvinainen

Julkaistu 1. syyskuuta 2008 White Cubeissa

175 sivua

Formed by the Royal College of Art in London and by the photographers Gilbert & Georges, for whom they have long been assistants, the Chapman duo rapidly distinguished themselves from the start in the world of sculpture and contemporary visual arts. With Disasters of War (1991), a bipartite work completed in 2003, they satirically revisit the eponymous drawings by Fransisco Goya, covering soldiers’ faces with clown masks. Works like this one or Fuck Face (1996), a series of glass-fibre sculptures depicting children whose noses have been replaced by a penis, enable them to establish themselves very quickly as the enfant terribles of British contemporary art.

A similar influence to Samuel Beckett, one of their admitted influences, the Chapmans do not believe in progress or humanism. However, unlike the writer, they decided, instead of dedicating their careers to silence, to say as much as possible, among other things by creating large-scale works. The best-known of these works is Hell (2000), the first maquette of a series of four, in which more than 30,000 figurines, Nazis in uniform, are shown committing acts of extreme violence. This ambitious sculpture had to be replaced in 2008 after a fire completely destroyed it. Fucking Hell, the new version, is larger and even more brutal. In an interview given to White Cube, Jake Chapman explains that the work, like many of their creations, responds to the human need to validate boundaries and social behaviours through art.