Jake (b. England 1966) and Dinos (b. England 1962) Chapman are among the best known contemporary British artists working today. First collaborating and working as an artistic duo in the early nineties (forming an integral part of the YBAs – Young British Artists), the Chapman Brothers and their works are well known for their subversive and provocative humour.
The Chapman Brothers first gained attention for their work Disasters of War, a three-dimensional recreation of Goya's series of etchings of the same name, for which they reconstructed Goya's scenes of brutal violence using miniature plastic figurines that they carefully reshaped and painted by hand.
For their Serpentine exhibition (their first London museum show) Come and See demonstrates the range of the artists’ output - from painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture, to film, music and literature - exploring their provocative and deliberately confrontational work, which approaches controversial subjects with irreverence and dark humour.
For their Limited Edition, the Chapman Brothers have created an etching that directly relates to the exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Written at the top of the edition are the words Come and See – the exhibition title, which references Elem Klimov’s 1985 film of the same name, about the horrors of World War II. The image on the edition is also the cover of the artists' book produced alongside the exhibition. The book comprises of elements from Jake and Dinos Chapman’s two-dimensional works that have been manipulated to produce a book of ‘tattoo flash’, in line with what might be found on the walls of tattoo parlours. The Chapmans are prolific producers of works on paper, creating works with imagery drawn from their own visual language, of which this Edition, with its skeleton-like children, is exemplary.
Jake and Dinos Chapman were nominated for The Turner Prize in 2003 and have exhibited their work extensively since the 1990s, including recent solo exhibitions at SongEun ArtSpace Museum, Seoul, and PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, (both 2013); The Hermitage, St Petersburg (2012); and Tate Liverpool (2006).
30.5 x 34.5 cms (paper size) 16.6 x 21.8 cms (image size)
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