Jake & Dinos Chapman
Etchasketchathon
© the artists
courtesy: Jay Jopling | White Cube (London)
information on the exhibition
With Jake and Dinos Chapman, the kestnergesellschaft brings two of the most important current British artists to Hanover. Emerging under the label of Young British Artists in the 1990’s, the brothers’ art is scandalous and provocative. Behind the shocking appearance on the surface, however, there is an intense engagement with themes of humanity and moral behaviour like humankind’s capacity for violence, barbarism and war.
“memento moronika” brings together different groups of works and thus demonstrates the diversity of the Chapmans’ picture language and techniques. Composed of toilet paper rolls, cardboard and poster paint, the new sculptures Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC (2004 – 2005) or Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good (2007) seem, in their unique and rough materiality, harmless when contrasted with the painted bronze sculptures, Little Death Machines (2008). The impression of dilettantish or infantile clumsiness, however, is deceiving, because the individual works hold a pivotal thematic position in the context of the brothers’ overall oeuvre. The title, Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC, refers to what is certainly the most ambitious and excessive work in the Chapmans’ oeuvre which was destroyed by fire in 2004: Hell (1999 – 2000), a tableau masterpiece consisting of more than thirty thousand tiny crafted figures which, mostly clothed in Nazi uniforms, carry out horrible acts of cruelty. Even though Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC, with its primeval dinosaurs, presents an entirely different motif, it is plausible to understand this work as a continuation of Hell. The graphic series, Etchasketchathon (2005) and If you eat meat digest this II (2005) oscillate between the previous works’ themes and Chapman’s newest visual world, too. While the former goes back to motives of children’s colouring books, the latter combines pictures of tortured animals with images from earlier works. Relating to their own creative process, all the works on paper have to be considered as self-referential. The Victorian portraits in Memento Moronika, under the title of One day you’ll no longer be loved, are visual novelties on the one hand. On the other hand, the Chapmans follow a strategy they have already put to the test on graphics by Goya: Painting onto the original work.
A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.