ART-PRESENTATION: Jake & Dinos Chapman-The Disasters of Everyday Life
From the early ‘90s, Jake and Dinos Chapman have continued to provoke. Whether subverting artists’ original works (including their own) twisting historic narratives or peeling back the surface of consumer-driven culture to reveal the horror and humour that lies beneath, the Chapmans compel us to confront the nagging fears that lie at the dark heart of the Western psyche.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive
Jake & Dinos Chapman for their first exhibition with Blain|Southern, expand on their career-long preoccupation with Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, “The Disasters of War”. “The Disasters of Everyday Life” presents, for the first time, their latest body of sculptural work in a dialogue with three full sets of Goya’s prints, each set substantially reworked in a different way by the Chapman brothers. Jake & Dinos Chapman began collaborating in the early 1990s and first gained attention for their work “Disasters of War”, a three-dimensional recreation of Goya’s series of etchings of the same name, for which they reconstructed Goya’s scenes of brutal violence using miniature plastic figurines that they carefully reshaped and painted by hand.. In 2003, Jake & Dinos Chapman exhibited an altered version of “The Disasters of War”. They purchased a complete set of prints, over which they drew and pasted demonic clown and puppy heads. Jake & Dinos Chapman described their images as making a connection between Napoleon’s supposed introduction of Enlightenment ideals to early 19th Century Spain and Tony Blair and George W. Bush purporting to bring democracy to Iraq. Goya’s suite of etchings “Los Desastres de la Guerra” (ca 1810-1823) depicts the atrocities inflicted upon the Spanish people by Napoleon’s invading army, but also the subsequent revenge exacted. The images are often described as the first unromanticized depictions of war. Comprised of 80 etchings, the suite was first published in 1863, 35 years after Goya’s death. The series is usually considered in three groups which broadly mirror the order of their creation. The first 47 focus on incidents from the war and show the consequences of the conflict on individual soldiers and civilians. The middle series (plates 48 to 64) record the effects of the famine that hit Madrid in 1811-12, before the city was liberated from the French. The final 17 reflect the bitter disappointment of liberals when the restored Bourbon monarchy, encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812 and opposed both state and religious reform. Goya’s scenes of atrocities, starvation, degradation and humiliation have been described as the “Prodigious flowering of rage”. The serial nature in which the plates unfold has led some to see the images as similar in nature to photography.
Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration: 4/10-11/11/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com
