COPENHAGEN.- David Risley Gallery is presenting ‘Come, Hell or High Water’, the first solo exhibition in Denmark with artist duo Jake & Dinos Chapman. The exhibition includes new works (2014) in the form of dioramas, sculptures and lithographies, as well as their iconic - reworked and improved - etchings by Francisco de Goya’s Los Caprichos, among other pieces.
Jake and Dinos Chapman (born 1966 and 1962, respectively) are among the most significant and best-known British artists working today. Together they have created a unique oeuvre that draws on vast areas of culture, including art history, philosophy, cybernetics and artificial intelligence.
Yet the artists’ attention to details is never more obvious than in their miniaturized apocalyptic landscapes; iconoclastic works of vitrine-encased dioramas. The surreal nightmare of tiny violence in these works is off-set by an extraordinary level of detail such as in Nein! Eleven (2012/2013) and Don’t look now (2014); dioramas where horrors of war and consumerism are embodied side by side. The works consist of surreal and grotesque universes created as battlegrounds in miniature. The monstrous is painstakingly recreated with black humour and irony in Jake & Dinos Chapman's comic and horror aesthetics. The works combine historical, religious and mythic narratives in an apocalyptic snapshot of the twentieth century. Humour is as important in this exhibition as irreverence and carnage.
‘Come, Hell or High Water’ is an exhibitions filled with nauseating gore and crude hyper-reality. This is the classic art dialectic of vanitas; birth, death, sex, horror… and of course McDonald’s.
Surrounding the three-dimensional pieces is another conversation in waiting; the artists’ ‘surfaced’ series of works Like a dog returns to its vomit (2005) created from the bought and appropriated Disaster of War sequel by Goya, drawn over – reworked and improved – with Chapman’s own iconography in colour. This might be a reference to the changing values of iconography from religious to capitalist, a Duchampian dialogue about authorship in art and the committing of art-historical sacrilege in the defacement of high-art to, ironically, create high-art.
Another featured series of etchings in the exhibition titled Exquisite Corpse (2000) is based on a game that was invented by the Surrealists called 'Le Cadavre Exquis'. The finished figures in the Exquisite Corpse series are limbed and often dual-headed and, as in several of Chapman's three- dimensional pieces, they depict composite, deformed and monstrous bodies and figures. The imagery consists of skulls, eyes on stalks, grotesque animal heads, liquids dripping and oozing from wounds and orifices, spiders hanging in threads from nipples, while limbs are deformed by insects and disintegrated roots. The images recreate the surreal worlds of artists like Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), Goya (1746-1819) and Georges Bataille (1897-1962).
Shock in art is a dead concept in a contemporary world filled with visual saturation. If not for the tools with which these shocks are delivered; being juxtaposed with humour and the commitment to miniscule hand-crafted detail reminiscent of Renaissance artisans. The greatest shock of all is not visual but found in the duality of certain works to also be what they actually pertain to discuss.
Often the duo’s conceptual underpinnings are as meticulous an invention as their craftsmanship. Like with a number of the artists’ two-dimensional works that have been manipulated into ‘tattoo flash’ and made available in book form. The visitors at the opening night of ‘Come, Hell or High Water’ at David Risley Gallery can choose a tattoo from a select number of the Champman brother’s works and in being tattooed with the design can actually become a part of the artists’ oeuvre.
Jake & Dinos Chapman have exhibited internationally at the most prestigious art institutions.
Selected solo exhibitions include Serpentine Sackler Gallery, (2013); , Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2013); The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (2012); Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare, Italy (2010); Hastings Museum, UK (2009); Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2008); Tate Britain, London (2007); Tate Liverpool (2006); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005); Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf (2003); Modern Art Oxford (2003); and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2000).
Group exhibitions include 1st Kiev International Biennale (2012), 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); Meadows Museum, Texas (2010); ‘Rude Britannia’, Tate Britain (2010); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2010); Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art, S.M.A.K, Ghent (2010), National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009); Kunstverein Hamburg (2009); British Museum, London (2009); Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille (2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2008); ICA, London (2008); ‘Summer Exhibition’, Annenberg Courtyard, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007); ARS 06, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki (2006) and The Turner Price, Tate Britain, London (2003).
