Jake and Dinos Chapman (*1966 in Cheltenham, *1962 in London; live and work in London) are among the leading representatives of contemporary British Art. They had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in London in 1996, and they took part in the legendary exhibition “Sensation” in 1997, to mention just two shows. In 2003, they were short-listed for the prestigious Turner Prize.

The Chapman brothers are always pushing borders and challenging taboos. Aggressively and with the blackest humour and most subversive wit, they examine subjects like violence,war, the Holocaust, genetic engineering, and death. Even if their work may at first glance seem in-your-face, scandalous, and controversial, there is a concept with a definite philosophical claim behind their art.

Like many artists of their generation, Jake and Dinos Chapman allude to historical art in their work. Since the beginning of their career, they have always dealt with the work of the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya
(1746–1828). Their examination of Goya’s “Los Desastres de la Guerra” (Disasters of War,1810–1820) has been a constant theme of their work for more than a decade. In his series, which comprises 80 etchings, Goya, reflecting on the Napoleonic occupation of Spain from 1808 to 1814, created one of the most extreme depictions of barbarian cruelty in graphic arts.

The Chapman brothers acquired a complete set of this series from the Goya Foundation; it was printed in 1937 using the original plates. They doctored these as they saw fit, magnifying the brutality of the etchings by caricaturing some of the figures with distorted grimaces.

“What we were interested in was how and whether we are allowed or able to show moral views.”
“Insult to Injury” was the title they gave the paintings they reworked in 2003.

The Chapman brothers rose to international prominence with their work “Great Deeds Against the Dead” (1994) that quotes the eponymous plate from Goya’s series “Disasters of War” using lifesize mannequins.


 With their bronze sculptures under the title “Sex” (2003), the Chapman brothers make a jump in time. They show the decomposed corpses from “Great Deeds Against the Dead” (1994). The bodies are swarming with flies, maggots,worms, and all sorts of creatures which have picked their bones clean. At first glance, everything seems naturalistic. It isn’t until one examines the work more closely and talks to the artists that one realizes the flies and worms were originally cheap plastic reproductions from toy stores and novelty shops. These were cast in bronze and hand-painted by the artists. Naturalism becomes a travesty, but it still sends goose bumps up your spine and is put into perspective through the use of elements from the horror genre and black humour.

A symbol of our global age is the American fast food chain McDonald’s, which has infiltrated the most remote corners of the world. Under the title “The Chapman Family Collection” (2002), the Chapman brothers have created wooden sculptures inspired by African masks and fetish objects, parodying or unearthing the hypocrisies in displaying ethnographic art by integrating McDonald’s symbols.

The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz is the first major solo show of the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman in Austria. Along with the 34-part set of sculptures “The Chapman Family Collection” (2002), the sculptures “Sex I” (2003), “Sex II” (2003), and “Sex” (2003), the sculptures “Death I” (2003) and “Death II” (2003), as well as the entire cycle of 80 plates “Insult to Injury” (2003), visitors will also be able to see “Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC” (2004–2005), Jake and Dinos Chapman’s most recent work and one created exclusively for the Kunsthaus Bregenz.