Jake Chapman, Dinos Chapman Untitled from Exquisite Corpse 2000

  • Not on view

Brothers who are artistic collaborators, the Chapmans emerged as members of the Young British Artists (YBA) group in London in the early 1990s. Their sculptures, installations, and works on paper are deliberately aimed at confronting middle-class values and notions of good taste. Among their controversial early works are fiberglass sculptures of figures whose facial features have been replaced by genitalia.

Despite their sardonic nihilism and bad-boy reputations, the Chapmans' work is often grounded in art history, including repeated references to Francisco de Goya and other proponents of satire and fantasy. These etchings, for example, are from a portfolio inspired by the Surrealist game of chance known as Exquisite Corpse, in which a sheet of paper is folded into four parts corresponding to the head, chest, trunk, and legs of a human body. Each player draws one section and then conceals it before passing it on to the next. In that manner the two brothers took turns drawing on prepared etching plates to make this portfolio. Combining horror with humor and clearly relishing the minute, obsessive details that are possible in etching, the Chapmans concocted the hallucinatory figures in this series by connecting various bizarre, incongruous, and often sexualized or scatological forms.

Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art , p. 208.
Additional text

The brothers Dinos and Jake Chapman, known for their sculptural installations involving shock-value tactics and pointed assaults on "good taste," began working together as artists in 1992. Their first major project was a 1993 collection of toy-soldier-sized figurines based on Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War (c. 1810-23), the famous print series chronicling human brutality. They have continued to revisit this theme periodically in sculptural projects as well as in a major suite of eighty-three prints, all of which reflect a darkly humorous, nihilistic, anti-establishment point of view. In a recent project titled Insult to Injury (2003), they took the controversial step of "rectifying" an actual set of Goya's prints by using watercolor to add the faces of clowns, dogs, donkeys, and other grotesque and comical figures.

The Chapmans' own involvement with printmaking includes two large cycles of etchings published by The Paragon Press, one related to Goya, mentioned above, and one presented here. Both projects reflect an appreciation for the minute, obsessive details that are possible in etching, and an admiration for a tradition of the grotesque in printmaking that extends from Pieter Breughel through Goya to James Ensor, Otto Dix, and Surrealism. The Exquisite Corpse portfolio was inspired by a Surrealist game of chance, known by this title, in which a sheet of paper is folded into four parts roughly corresponding to the head, chest, trunk, and legs of a human body. Each player, working in turn, completes a section and conceals it before passing the paper to the next. To translate this process into printmaking, each brother worked on a section of a plate and then covered it up before passing it to the other. The final images pay homage to their Surrealist forebearers with horrifying creatures that seem to have arisen from some subconscious, hallucinatory world.

Publication excerpt from an essay by Starr Figura, in Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 253.
Medium
One from a portfolio of 20 etchings
Dimensions
plate: 8 7/8 x 6 15/16" (22.6 x 17.7 cm); sheet: 18 1/8 x 14 7/8" (46.1 x 37.8 cm)
Publisher
The Paragon Press, London
Printer
Hope (Sufferance) Press, London
Edition
30
Credit
Roxanne H. Frank Fund
Object number
1334.2000.19
Copyright
© 2024 Jake and Dinos Chapman
Department
Drawings and Prints

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].