Hell

Product Information

The Chapmans have spent years reworking Goya's most disturbing images; they even bought a set of his prints only to deface them. "Like us, Goya had a heretical approach to the body," Jake explains. He cites one of the most upsetting prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820, a work entitled A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!, in which three hideously butchered corpses hang from a tree. It's a work the brothers recreated in three dimensions, in their 1993 work of the same title. Why does it resonate for them? "When Goya put three mutilated bodies in a tree, it was read as echoing Christ's crucifixion, suggesting that some kind of redemption is possible. But you can see it another way. Goya is being quite cruel about Christian redemption, shifting the Christian iconography to show there's nothing beyond. That what you're looking at is dead bodies. There is nothing to be optimistic about. It's just aestheticised dead flesh. He looks to be giving a moral demonstration, but he's not." The brothers' first joint work is also their first tribute to Francisco Goya, an artist that they have continued to reference throughout their careers. This piece is a three-dimensional representation of Goya's etchings of the same name made in miniature using toy soldiers. Goya's etchings depicted the atrocities of war experienced during the Napoleonic invasions of his native Spain in 1808 including gruesome scenes of bayonetting, beheading, torture, and death. Goya's work provided such a powerful polemic, that it could not be exhibited in his lifetime Hell is riddled with detail, but no one bit is more significant than any other: it’s equally horrific. Every act is occurring at the same second. It’s a snapshot, one mass moment of nastiness. The process of making it was the whole point: even if you create something out of 60,000 Nazi figures, it’s still nowhere near the actual thing it’s referring to. Two years of work making 60,000 little soldiers – and the Nazis were able to murder 60,000 Russian PoWs in six hours. It's not about the Holocaust. It’s the Nazis who are being subjected to industrial genocide Jake Chapman As the National Gallery opens Picasso: Challenging the Past, I found myself wondering if any 21st-century artists are worthy of the same honour. It has taken a long time for the great Picasso to make it. Is there anyone at work in Britain now who could have a meaningful exhibition here? I think there's only one answer.

Children who visit the gallery will get some protection from the Chapmans' more grotesque imaginings. "We're scatter-hanging the gallery," explains curator Selina Levinson, "so we can put the most upsetting images higher up." How does Jake feel about this cunning if sanitising hang? "In this case we have been relaxed about it. We have to be respectful of [the gallery's] thoughts about what the public and the trustees will find acceptable." The thing we objected to was not so much Goya’s meaning – we’re actually trying to gouge them from this moralistic framework and maybe release its libidinal economy to show that these works are much more radically unhinged and unstable and they don’t deserve to be accumulated to some sort of post-Christian redemption.”The Chapman Brothers have embraced this role as provocateurs, with an energy and humour that makes their works alternately affronting and highly amusing. In their words: “If you look at the genealogy of our work beginning with the first Goya prints we used, we got the book, we chopped it up, then we got the little soldiers and we chopped them up. It’s art as a creative and a destructive act, but, in our case, it’s definitely more destructive.” curatorluc tuymans next to caravaggio’s ‘david with the head of goliath’, post 1606, at fondazione prada, milan Their large Hell landscapes, such as Hell (2000) and The Sum of All Evil (2012-13), are at once monumental in scale and minutely detailed. These apocalyptic landscapes, teeming with miniature figures, depict scenes of excessive brutality involving Nazi soldiers and, in more recent works, McDonald’s characters. The grotesque and often surreal violence of the scenes is offset by the overwhelming detail and painstaking labour evident in these and many of the Chapmans’s works. The graphic images of rape and impalement, she added, were meant to fascinate and appal the viewer.

Violet and white bursts of colour, the clown heads and puppy faces are astonishingly horrible. They are given life, personality, by some very acute drawing, and so it's not a collision but a collaboration, an assimilation, as they really do seem to belong in the pictures - one art historical antecedent is Max Ernst's collages in which 19th-century lithographs are reorganised into a convincing dream world. What the Chapmans have released is something nasty, psychotic and value-free; not so much a travesty of Goya as an extension of his despair. What they share with him is the most primitive and archaic and Catholic pessimism of his art - the sense not just of irrationality but something more tangible and diabolic. And then, in words likely to chill the staff of the Goya museum, he added: “I’ve brought some felt tips with me, so … ” in luc tuymans’ vision, caravaggio was the first to transcend classical and mannerist tradition thanks to the psychological realism expressed by his innovative pictorial language; he also embodied the spirit of the baroque artist and the wish to communicate with the public through the power of representation.

Goya's modernity has never exhausted itself; he was as immediate to Picasso and Dali as he was to Manet; of all pre-modern artists, he is the one who most resembles a modernist. This is who the Chapmans have victimised. Unholy Libel: Six Feet Under; exhibition catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, New York 1997, reproduced (colour) fig.xvii [pp.98-9] This is pure Freud; in a 1927 essay, Humour, he asserted that, “Humour has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation… the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” As Dinos puts it, “If you can laugh at someone while they’re beating your head in, they’re not beating your head in.”

The Chapman bothers, however, note that they are not making a point about human savagery, rather about art, and its eventual impotency. Picasso turned to Goya for inspiration when he produced Guernica (1937), a powerful piece which responded to the bombing of a Basque country village in northern Spain by German and Italian warplanes. The work is revered now, but had no impact on the course of the Second World War and its resulting 60 million deaths. Art cannot stop violence, the Chapman brothers assert, just as Picasso's Guernica was unable to prevent the horrors of the Second World War. But we live in ahistoric, depthless times, not least in art, and it's getting hard to be unimpressed by the sheer dedication of the Chapmans. The artists themselves claim they prefer to be despised as banal anti-humanists than praised piously as humanists. The language of praise we use for art is amazingly limited; if we like a work of art, we feel compelled to find depth, anger, moral fervour, spiritual truth - all the things the Chapmans claim to reject. Significant exhibitions of their work include the Young British Artists (YBA) showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. They were nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 2003 but lost out to Grayson Perry.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Many of their shows offer titles that are as provocative as the artworks themselves, such as The Blind Leading The Blind (Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague), In the Realm of the Senseless (Artur, Istanbul, Turkey), To Live and Think Like Pigs (UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, USA) or SHITROSPECTIVE (Contemporary Fine Arts Galerie, Berlin). The idea, according to the exhibition’s curator, Lola Durán, is to illustrate just how profoundly Goya has influenced artists from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí to the Chapmans. Many of the works created by the Chapman Brothers’ are installations, or three dimensional environments with multiple facets and nuances. In light of this, we’re sharing a number of videos of their exhibitions, to offer a more complete sense of their art and aesthetic. The brothers will also be running drawing and poetry workshops. "Another idea we had is a colouring competition, where the winner would have me and Dinos come round and read them a bedtime story." What would they read? Quite possibly something from their soon-to-be published collection of reworked fairytales, entitled Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights. It's a book that begins: