New show for controversial artist

May 2 2008 by Julie Richards, Western Mail

SABRE-toothed owls, skeletal clowns, psychedelic grinning cats and bears trapped in the belly of the Loch Ness monster…

Yes the “bad boys” of British art, Dinos and Jake Chapman, in their characteristic, irreverent style have turned the sweet and simple imagery from children’s dot-to-dot colouring books into images that appear sinister and surreal.

My Giant Colouring Book, on show at Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen, is a series of 21 etchings which explore dark and disturbing themes and challenge the innocence of childhood.

Deviating wildly from the usual dot-to-dot imagery, Dinos Chapman says the pieces “are about how wrong you could make an image. How you could use nodal points and ignore them at the same time”.

The images, loosely based on children’s colouring books, were copied through photo-etching onto copper plates.

The resultant effect is of images that convey a nightmarish quality and chaotic energy taken from the deepest depths of the unconscious.

The cute cuddly teddy bear wears a demonic smile that reveals scarily sharp teeth, bulging eyes and entrails dripping and spilling over from his torso ripped wide open.

Mr Piggy no longer looks scared of the wolf but is dapperly dressed from head to trotter in a smart city suit, complete with a bow tie and top hat.

A wry joke and a poke at fat cats or pigs as the case may be, or perhaps, even an art critic or two?

The sunshine seems to cast rays of darkness rather than light and the tranquil woodland scenery is splattered with ghoulish, ugly faces that you wouldn’t want to see if you went down to the woods.

The Chapman brothers also weave a vast range of associations into their work, using material from all areas of the cultural landscape, including popular and consumer culture, philosophical theory, art history and psychoanalysis.

Dinos Chapman was born in 1962 in London and Jack Chapman was born in 1966 in Cheltenham. They began working together in 1992 after studying at the Royal College of Art, London, and working as assistants to the equally infamous artistic duo Gilbert and George.

They have exhibited extensively, including solo shows at Tate Liverpool and Modern Art Oxford, and were nominated for the Turner Prize.

Constantly pushing the boundaries of good and bad taste, they engage with controversial, often taboo subjects. Their work has also questioned the presumptuous and precious notions of originality, the nature of aesthetic appropriation, the artist as a craftsman and the meaning and value of art itself.

In 1991 they received critical acclaim for a complex diorama sculpture Disasters of War. The work was created out of remodelled plastic figurines enacting scenes from Spanish artist Goya’s Disasters of War etchings.

Later they took a single scene from the work and meticulously transformed it into Great Deeds Against the Dead, a life-size tableau of reworked fibreglass mannequins which showed three castrated and mutilated soldiers tied to a tree.

Their most ambitious work was Hell, an immense tabletop tableau that was destroyed by fire in 2004. The work was peopled with more than 30,000 remodelled, two-inch high figures, many in Nazi uniform and performing egregious acts of cruelty. The work combined historical, religious and mythic narratives to present an apocalyptic snapshot of the twentieth-century.

Dinos Chapman once told Time Out: “By the time we die we will have done everything – flower arranging, pottery, origami…

“We have no signature style; the work is recognisable for its attitude, not its form.”

Whatever you may think about the Chapman brothers, their work will continue to provoke and pick at the hypocrisies and contradictions of contemporary culture with a technical mastery and a debauched humour that arguably makes them some of the most compelling and inventive of artists today.

The show is at Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen until May 31