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The
Marriage of
Reason and Squalor
Jake
& Dinos Chapman
30
APRIL-25 JULY
The
Marriage of Reason and Squalor is the first solo
exhibition in Spain by the Chapman brothers, Jake
& Dinos (Cheltenham, 1966 and London, 1962). Famous
for their shocking and provocative works and for
their outstanding skills in drawing and sculpture,
the are two of the most controversial artists
working today.
The
exhibition comprises
a group of ten works made between 2000 and 2004
and
is made up of four of the subjects prevailing
in their work: the globalisation of consumerism,
social taboos, the artistic process and the work
of the universal Spanish painter Francisco de
Goya.
Goya's
Disasters of War (1810-1820) have inspired Injury
to Insult to Injury (2004), a new complete series
of 80 engravings by the Aragonese painter that
have, so the technical details record, been "worked
and improved" by the artists. This is a new
body of work that has never been shown to the
public before and which follows on from the controversial
Insult to Injury (2003), in which the brothers
"rectified" an edition of outstanding
value of this visual chronicle of the horrors
that took place during the Napoleonic invasion
of Spain.
This
same work by Goya is also the inspiration of the
sculptural group entitled Sex I (2003), another
life-size version, this time completed in bronze,
of one of the most striking prints by the universally-acclaimed
Spanish painter. The
body of work connected to the Spanish master finishes
with their own reinterpretation of the Disasters
of War. Under the same title, this series (2001)
comprises eighty three handcoloured etchings with
watercolour that show their vision about war and
violence.
Viewer
participation Authenticity, originality and the
creative process are the motifs of the two bronze
sculptures from which the exhibition takes its
name: The Marriage of Reason and Squalor I and
II (2003). The participation of the public will
be an essential part for the installation known
as The Rape of Creativity (2003-2004), a large-scale
allegory of the artistic process, conceived as
a perversion set within the battlefield of sex
and death.
Easels, canvases and paintings will invite the
viewer to take part in the work.
The 'M' symbol of a famous fast food chain also
dominates the work Rizhome (2000), a model that
recreates a miniature McDonalds drive-in restaurant
and refers to the consequences that derive from
globalization and the consumer society in which
Man seems to be immersed today. In the same sense,
the dictatorship of consumerism is the main theme
of California Über-alles (2003), four large
red banners that recall those that were used by
the Nazis and on which the swastika is replaced
with "Mr. Smiley".
The
sculpture Death I (2003) and a series of 83 etchings
grouped together under the title of Gigantic Fun
(2000) complete the exhibition. In these of their
works the Chapmans reflect upon a number of social
taboos in a humorous and provocative manner, appropriating
imagery recovered from diverse sources within
the history of art and today's consumer culture.
The
Chapman brothers are members of the YBAs generation
-Young British Artists- that emerged in the late
1990s at the Sensation exhibition and that includes
a total of 42 British artists, amongst them Tracey
Emin, Mona Hauton, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah
Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Jane Simpson. All
of them take an irreverent stance, defying the
institutionalised society in which they work,
championing an art of the depraved and the grotesque,
all of it imbued with an air of irony and blasphemy
that attacks our most deeply rooted taboos in
order to make the individual viewer reflect on
the world. The work of Jake and Dinos Chapman
has often aroused considerable debate within an
international context. In an age of disbelief,
when death, destruction and sex are usual on the
media, the artists have answered their critics
quite categorically: "anyone who is scandalized
by our work is either a hypocrite or is sick".
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