Iakovos “Jake” Chapman (born 1966) and Konstantinos “Dinos” Chapman (born 1962) are English visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers, who work together as a collaborative sibling duo. Their subject matter tends to concentrate on whatever is generally deemed to be appalling, vulgar, offensive, etc.—including, in 2008, a series of works that appropriated original watercolours made by the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. In the mid-1990s their sculptures were included in the YBA showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. In 2003, the two were nominated for the annual Turner Prize but lost out to Grayson Perry.
Jake Chapman was born in Cheltenham and Dinos Chapman in London. Their father was a British art teacher and their mother an orthodox Greek Cypriot (hence “Jake” an anglicized diminutive of the orthodox Iakovos, and “Dinos”, a typical diminutive of the orthodox Konstantinos). They were brought up in Cheltenham but moved to Hastings where they attended a local comprehensive before both attending the University of East London Art college – then at Greengate House, Plaistow – and then enrolling at The Royal College of Art, when they worked as assistants to the artists Gilbert and George.
They began their own collaboration in 1991. The brothers have often made pieces with plastic models or fibreglass mannequins of people. An early piece consisted of eighty-three scenes of torture and disfigurement similar to those recorded by Francisco Goya in his series of etchings, The Disasters of War (a work they later returned to) rendered into small three-dimensional plastic models. One of these was later turned into a life-size work, Great Deeds Against the Dead, shown along with Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlarged x 1000) at the Sensation exhibition in 1997.
The Chapman brothers continued the theme of anatomical and pornographic grotesque with a series of mannequins of children, sometimes fused together, with genitalia in place of facial features. Their sculpture Hell (2000) consisted of a large number of miniature figures of Nazis arranged in nine glass cases laid out in the shape of a swastika. In 2003 with a series of works named Insult to Injury, they altered a set of Goya’s etchings by adding funny faces. As a protest against this piece, Aaron Barschak (who later gate-crashd Prince William’s 21st birthday party dressed as Osama bin Laden in a frock) threw a pot of red paint over Jake Chapman during a talk he was giving in May 2003. The Chapmans’ oeuvre has also referenced work by William Blake, Auguste Rodin and Nicolas Poussin. Jake Chapman has published a number of catalogue essays and pieces of art criticism in his own right, as well as a book, Meatphysics, published by Creation Books in 2003. The brothers have also designed a label for Becks beer as part of a series of limited edition labels produced by contemporary artists. Using a title from the Tim Burton film, in 2004 they curated A Nightmare Before Christmas as part of the occasional All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival at Camber Sands.
From April – June 2003, Jake and Dinos Chapman held a solo show at Modern Art Oxford entitled The Rape of Creativity in which “the enfants terribles of Britart, bought a mint collection of Goya’s most celebrated prints – and set about systematically defacing them”. The Francisco Goya prints were his Disasters of War set of 80 etchings. The duo named their newly defaced works Insult to Injury. BBC described more of the exhibition’s art: “Drawings of mutant Ronald McDonalds, a bronze sculpture of a painting showing a sad-faced Hitler in clown make-up and a major installation featuring a knackered old caravan and fake dog turds.” Whilst The Daily Telegraph commented that the Chapman brothers had “managed to raise the hackles of art historians by violating something much more sacred to the art world than the human body – another work of art”, they also noted that the effect of their work was powerful.
The Chapman brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003. As well as including Insult to Injury, their Turner Prize exhibit debuted two new works Sex and Death. Sex directly referenced their previous work Great Deeds against the Dead. The original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree, Sex shows the same scenario, but in a heightened state of decay. Additionally clown’s noses are now present on the skulls of the corpses; snakes, rats and insects (like those found in joke shops) cover the piece. Death is two sex dolls, placed on top of each other, head-to-toe in the 69 sex position: despite appearing to be made of plastic it is in fact cast in bronze and painted to look like plastic.
That year the prize was eventually won by Grayson Perry.
On 24 May 2004, a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection including Hell. The brothers subsequently made a very similar, though more extensive, work called Fucking Hell.
In 2006, the journalist Lynn Barber claimed that she had received a death threat from the brothers, following conducting an interview with them.
In 2007, they were criticised by journalist Johann Hari for adopting an anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and for Jake Chapman saying that the boys who murdered Liverpool toddler James Bulger performed “a good social service”. Jake Chapman responded by calling Johann Hari “fat-faced ugly [and] four-eyed” and “a fascist”, and claimed the Bulger quote and others had been “stripped from the serious debate in which they belong”. This followed a public media brawl between Jake Chapman and journalist Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer and on the internet the previous year. Cadwalladr told readers that Chapman threw her out of their studio. Jake publicly replied, “You may grace your readers with the meek tones of plum-mouthed middle englanders, but don’t send them round to my studio I’ll make [...] mince meat out of them, ha ha ha.”
It was announced in December 2007 that the brothers would play Big Brother during 2008′s Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack. They had to pull out for undisclosed reasons.
In May 2008 the White Cube gallery exhibited 13 apparently authenticated watercolours painted by Adolf Hitler, to which the brothers had added hippie motifs. Jake Chapman described most of the dictator’s works as ‘awful landscapes’ which they had ‘prettified’. Also included in the exhibition was Fucking Hell, the (somewhat altered) remake of Hell, and a series of doctored eighteenth and nineteenth century-style aristocratic portraits in oils.
On October 1, 2010, in an open letter to the British Government’s culture secretary Jeremy Hunt—co-signed by a further 27 previous Turner prize nominees, and 19 winners—the brothers opposed any future cuts in public funding for the arts. In the letter the cosignatories described the arts in Britain as a “remarkable and fertile landscape of culture and creativity.”
http://www.jakeanddinoschapman.com/
