Jake & Dinos Chapman

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is the first solo exhibition in Spain by the Chapman brothers, Jake & Dinos (Cheltenham, 1966 and London, 1962). Famous for their shocking and provocative works and for their outstanding skills in drawing and sculpture, the are two of the most controversial artists working today.

The exhibition comprises a group of ten works made between 2000 and 2004 and is made up of four of the subjects prevailing in their work: the globalisation of consumerism, social taboos, the artistic process and the work of the universal Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.

Goya's Disasters of War (1810-1820) have inspired Injury to Insult to Injury (2004), a new complete series of 80 engravings by the Aragonese painter that have, so the technical details record, been "worked and improved" by the artists. This is a new body of work that has never been shown to the public before and which follows on from the controversial Insult to Injury (2003), in which the brothers "rectified" an edition of outstanding value of this visual chronicle of the horrors that took place during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.

This same work by Goya is also the inspiration of the sculptural group entitled Sex I (2003), another life-size version, this time completed in bronze, of one of the most striking prints by the universally-acclaimed Spanish painter. The body of work connected to the Spanish master finishes with their own reinterpretation of the Disasters of War. Under the same title, this series (2001) comprises eighty three handcoloured etchings with watercolour that show their vision about war and violence.

Viewer participation Authenticity, originality and the creative process are the motifs of the two bronze sculptures from which the exhibition takes its name: The Marriage of Reason and Squalor I and II (2003). The participation of the public will be an essential part for the installation known as The Rape of Creativity (2003-2004), a large-scale allegory of the artistic process, conceived as a perversion set within the battlefield of sex and death. Easels, canvases and paintings will invite the viewer to take part in the work.

The 'M' symbol of a famous fast food chain also dominates the work Rizhome (2000), a model that recreates a miniature McDonalds drive-in restaurant and refers to the consequences that derive from globalization and the consumer society in which Man seems to be immersed today. In the same sense, the dictatorship of consumerism is the main theme of California Über-alles (2003), four large red banners that recall those that were used by the Nazis and on which the swastika is replaced with "Mr. Smiley".

The sculpture Death I (2003) and a series of 83 etchings grouped together under the title of Gigantic Fun (2000) complete the exhibition. In these of their works the Chapmans reflect upon a number of social taboos in a humorous and provocative manner, appropriating imagery recovered from diverse sources within the history of art and today's consumer culture.

The Chapman brothers are members of the YBAs generation -Young British Artists- that emerged in the late 1990s at the Sensation exhibition and that includes a total of 42 British artists, amongst them Tracey Emin, Mona Hauton, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Jane Simpson. All of them take an irreverent stance, defying the institutionalised society in which they work, championing an art of the depraved and the grotesque, all of it imbued with an air of irony and blasphemy that attacks our most deeply rooted taboos in order to make the individual viewer reflect on the world. The work of Jake and Dinos Chapman has often aroused considerable debate within an international context. In an age of disbelief, when death, destruction and sex are usual on the media, the artists have answered their critics quite categorically: "anyone who is scandalized by our work is either a hypocrite or is sick".

Pressetext

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor
Jake & Dinos Chapman