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art : features Just who do the Chapman brothers think they are? Jake and Dinos Chapman, arguably one of the most successful of the crop of young British artists to emerge in the nineties, have a new show at the Saatchi gallery. Except it's not a new show, it's the old stuff again. After seeing their last new work (The Rape of Creativity) at Modern Art Oxford in the summer I have decided that we may have a serious case of the emperor's new clothes. I've decided, after many years, that their work is rubbish. Both now in their late 30s, Jake and Dinos Chapman graduated from the Royal College of Art and were part of the Frieze exhibition that Damian Hirst curated whilst he was still at Goldsmiths. They were also, along with Emin et al, part of the now seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997 and have since exhibited world-wide. Their work, if you've not seen it, can be quite shocking (in a non-shocking way). Great Deeds of the Dead (1994) attempted a three dimensional representation of mutilated corpses based on Goya's Disasters of War series, whilst Tragic Anatomies (1996) is a sculpture of children with penises and vaginas sprouting out of their faces. It was seeing the Oxford show that burst the bubble for me. Yet more Goya (vandalised prints this time), pornography and Ronald McDonald as the antichrist. Oh, come on. None of it has the genuine chill of, say, Marcus Harvey's portrait of child killer Myra Hindley painted in children's hand-prints or even the sense of humour of Tracy Emin. Time to get a new idea boys. TD |
Interview: Tate's
Head of Collections
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