Jake and Dinos Chapman

Iakovos "Jake" Chapman (born 1966) and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman (born 1962) are British visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers. Their subject matter tries to be deliberately shocking, including, in 2008, a series of works that appropriated original watercolours by 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. In 2013, their painting ''One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved III'' was the subject of Derren Brown's Channel 4 special, ''The Great Art Robbery''.

In 2022, with the announcement of Jake Chapman's solo show ''Me, Myself and Eye'', it was disclosed that the Chapman brothers had ended their professional association. Jake Chapman made reference to mutual "seething disdain" and told the ''Guardian'' they were both "sick of the partnership" and were "no longer having fresh ideas together".

Lives and careers

Jake Chapman was born in Cheltenham and Dinos Chapman in London. Their father was an English art teacher and their mother an orthodox Greek Cypriot (hence "Jake" an anglicised diminutive of the orthodox Iakovos, and "Dinos", a typical diminutive of the orthodox Konstantinos). They were brought up in Cheltenham but moved to St Leonards-on-Sea where they attended a local comprehensive (Christ Church Primary) & (William Parker School). Dinos studied at the Ravensbourne College of Art (1980–83), Jake at the North East London Polytechnic, (1985–88) before both together enrolled at the Royal College of Art (1988–90), when they also worked as assistants to the artists Gilbert and George.

Art collaboration

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 derivative of 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.

Their 1995 mannequin ''Two-faced Cunt'' was of a naked young girl with two heads joined together by a vagina, which sold for £91,250 in 2011. The Chapman brothers continued the theme of anatomical, pornographic and paedophilic grotesque with ''Fuck Face'', a series of mannequins of children, sometimes fused together, with genitalia in place of facial features. For example, one has a male toddler wearing a bright red smock with an erect penis in place of his nose and an open anus in place of his mouth. It sold for £115,250 in 2010.

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-crashed 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'' (Creation Books, 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. In October 2013 the Chapman brothers took part in ''Art Wars'' at the Saatchi Gallery curated by Ben Moore. The artists were issued with a stormtrooper helmet, which they transformed into a work of art. Proceeds went to the Missing Tom Fund set up by Moore to find his brother Tom who has been missing for over ten years. The work was also shown on the Regents Park platform as part of Art Below Regents Park.

The Rape of Creativity

From April–June 2003, the Chapmans 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 Francisco Goya's most celebrated prints – and set about systematically defacing them".Jones, Jonathan
Look What We Did
''The Guardian'', 31 March 2003. Retrieved 3 February 2009. The Goya prints referred to his '' Disasters of War'' set of 80 etchings. The duo named their newly defaced works ''Insult to Injury''. BBC
...