Jake and Dinos Chapman Signed Prints & Originals

Biography for Jake and Dinos Chapman

1962/66

‘The brutal brothers of the art world’ ‘The brothers Grim’ ‘The quick tempered Brit art Brothers’ ‘The enfants terribles of contemporary British art’, call them what you will but the Chapman bothers; shortlisted for the Turner Prize, winners of the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award, their highly collectable works swept up by the likes of Saatchi, The Tate Galleries and The Royal Academy of Art cannot be ignored. These YBS boys maybe brutally controversial but the execution of their works is always exquisite.

As Norman Rosenthal from the RCA says of the Chapman brothers apocalyptic work “Hell’ “You had to admire how exceptionally well-made it was. This is the central paradox of their work – it focuses on very brutal things but is so beautifully made. Their work is anti-art while playing on its own aesthetics. Its evidence of a very learned, very intelligent strategy.”

The Chapman Brothers 2000 sculpture ‘Hell’ (before it was razed to the ground in the Saatchi warehouse fire of 2005) consisted of thousands of a miniature Nazis figures committing various outrageous acts of murder and cannibalism, arranged in nine glass cases laid out in the shape of an inverted swastika. Following the fire, The Chapman brothers started on a “newer, improved Hell … bigger and brighter” called ‘Fucking Hell’.

Jake Chapman (born 1966) and his brother Dinos Chapman (born 1962) brought up in middle class Hastings and Cheltenham began their artistic endeavours at the University of East London before enrolling at The Royal College of Art and then going on to assist the artists Gilbert and George.

“To be truly contemporary you must have a good grasp of history, since it is perhaps only by looking back that you have a sense of where you are. It is in this that the Chapman brothers excel. Their work never leaves the past. Instead, it revels in it – in reheating old masterpieces by dead artists, in rolling in the ink and paint and dust of the past – and in being able to smile while doing so.” Said Mark Irving of Jake and Dinos Chapman in the Independent on Sunday.

Collaborating together in 1991, Jake and Dinos Chapman received critical acclaim for their fist sculptural piece ‘Disasters of War’, created out of remodeled plastic figurines enacting scenes of torture and disfigurement similar to those recorded by Francisco Goya in his ‘Disasters of War’ series of etchings. Later for the Sensation exhibition one of these ‘scenes’ they meticulously transformed into a life size tableau of reworked fibreglass mannequins. ‘Great Deeds Against the Dead’ depicts three castrated and mutilated soldiers tied to a tree and was shown alongside the equally shocking sculpture ‘Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlargedx1000)’ which is part of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s ‘gleefully grotesque’ series of mannequins of children often fused together with genitalia in place of facial features.

As well as creating sculpture, Jake and Dinos Chapman have an abiding interest in printmaking and their readiness to shock doesn’t falter in this medium either. Their subversive wit and black humour is undercut by the craftsmanship and painstaking labour that is so clearly evident in their execution of their prints, be it their expertise in draftsmanship, engraving, woodcuts or model making. In 1997 they contributed a screenprint for the group portfolio ‘Screen’ depicting their signature logo, in 4 screens, plus varnish and phosphorescent ink, edition size of 45, Signed by the artists on reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman.

In 1999 Jake and Dinos Chapman embraced a variety of etching techniques in their ambitious project ‘The Disasters of War’. Inspired once again by Goya’s print series ‘Desastres de la Guerra’ the brothers embarked on a series of eighty-three etchings. Employing classical etching technique of hard ground, soft ground and dry point with aquatint, they produced prints that display a rich and diverse range of images.

In these works Jake and Dinos Chapman are clearly responding to Francisco de Goya and his graphic depiction of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, while also giving free rein to their own drawing style and obsessions with the poles of beauty and pain, humour and horror, the sublime and perverse, the diabolical and the infantile. Like Goya’s Disasters of War, their post-Christian images focus on victims rather than victors; some plates actually rework Goya’s original images or fragments of them. For example, in one etching ‘Great Deeds Against the Dead’ with its mutilated, chopped-up bodies tied to a tree, has been overdrawn with a swastika; and in another, a seated soldier contemplating a hanged man has been turned into a hanged Nazi, observed by a grinning idiot. Although Goya-esque piles of body parts do make an appearance in these works, most depict contemporary monstrosities, the ‘horrors’ we know of through television pictures and newspaper photographs, as well as comic and Bataillian images, such as eyeballs sprouting tendrils of hair, and various grotesque views of bodily orifices.

A portfolio of 83 etching prints, there are two versions: Black ink on a white background in an edition of 15 and white ink on a black background in an edition of 10. All signed on reverse in pencil Jake and Dinos Chapman.

The Millennium year saw Jake and Dinos Chapman embark on another major etching project, this time given the literal title of ‘Exquisite Corpse’. A portfolio comprising of 20 etchings on which Jake and Dinos Chapman worked on in turn using the surrealist method ‘Cadavre Exquis’. A method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. Similar to the old parlour game called Consequence or in Jake and Dinos Chapman’s case Picture Consequences in which players draw in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the drawing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Titled: ’01-20′, each print is from an edition of 30 and signed on reverse in pencil Jake and Dinos Chapman.

2003 saw the start of Jake and Dinos Chapman expanding to a wider audience by producing some prints of a larger edition size. The outrageously intricate hardground etching ‘Birth of Ideas’, edition of 200, was snapped up by eager Chapman fans as soon as it was published. So too the etching print ‘The Rape of Creativity’, edition of 100. Both etching prints are signed in pencil Jake and Dinos Chapman on reverse.

In 2004 Jake and Dinos Chapman created a third print portfolio ‘My Giant Colouring Book’. Most of these wondrously dark prints are loosely based on dot-to-dot drawings from children’s colouring books, although being the Chapman Brothers, Jake and Dinos don’t follow the intended outline but create their own wonderfully distorted images such as; a teddy bear spewing its innards through a gaping hole in its fur, a maid holding a bunch of flowers walking from an exploding house, monsters raising from giant leaves and monkeys smoking cigarettes. This little book of horrors is waking us up to the fact that behind the idealised world of children’s books atrocities and monsters are lurking. Dinos Chapman states that far from being naïve “they are not innocent, they exist for a reason. The reason is to make sure the children grow up right … If you take it apart quite carefully it is fairly unpleasant-it depends on which version you read.”

The series of 21 etching are: ‘My Giant Colouring Book 1’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 2’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 3’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 4’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 5’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 6’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 7’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 8’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 9’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 10’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 11’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 12’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 13’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 14’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 15’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 16’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 17’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 18’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 19’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 20’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘My Giant Colouring Book 21’, edition of 35, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. The process the brothers used to create this series of prints was to draw the images on to mylar sheets, which are then transferred through a light-sensitive process on to polymer-graure-plates.

Jake and Dinos Chapman’s enthusiasm for drawing on to mylar incited the brothers appetite for more printmaking and so the following year they produced another series of etchings ‘Etchasketchathon’, a composite of words “etching”, “sketches” and “marathon” describes the mammoth process of producing yet another extraordinary intricate and detailed series of etchings. This time a larger series of 31 images and all of different sizes yet still following in the same dark and disturbing vein as ‘My Giant Colouring Book’. Drenched in factual and obscure art history references, the images, drawn completely by the brothers directly onto mylar with ink, (unlike ‘My Giant Colouring Book’ where the dot-to-dot drawings were printed underneath Jake and Dinos Chapman’s drawings) jump out at you as “an apocalyptic nightmare”. Dinos Chapman says of etching print ‘No. 8’; “This is Jasper Johns, because in England another name for a wasp is a jasper – and he is actually painting a Jack the Ripper painting-the kind of zombie there, the coffin, this burning cross and the knife, they are all taken off the top of a Jack the Ripper letter heading which he sent to one of the policemen – and also the whole thing ties in with their idea that Walter Sickert was supposedly jack the Ripper – so it’s kind of this big jumble of miss-matched narratives. Patricia Cornwell in her book about Walter Sickert is absolutely convinced that Sickert is Jack the Ripper-so you bundle all these things together in a way that they don’t really work and then you allow it to take on its own form – just kick it out of the studio and it has to go and defend itself.”

The ‘Etchasketchathon’ portfolio of etching prints are titled ’01-31′ and are of an edition size of 35, each print is signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman.

2005 saw Jake and Dinos huge print show ‘Like a Dog Returns to its Vomit’. An exhibition displaying their entire back catalogue of graphic works, displayed on two walls in the shape of dogs – one defecating and the other eating its shit. On display: the 2005 etchings: ‘Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs’, edition of 60 and signed in pencil on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘Dinos not Jake’ (2005), edition size 100, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. ‘Jake not Dinos’ (2005), edition size 100 signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman.

The success of the outrageously intricate and expertly executed etchings ‘Jake not Dinos’ (2005) and ‘Dinos not Jake’ (2005) was followed in 2006 with the equally brilliant ‘Dinos not Jake’ (2006), edition size 250, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. And ‘Jake not Dinos’ (2006), edition size 250, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. These two new editions by Jake and Dinos Chapman are based on their longstanding fascination with Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ etchings. The Chapman brothers have chosen two images that they have each individually worked on before, but this time Jake and Dinos are switching places and working on the other image. These works aim to undermine the myth of Goya as the first ‘modern’ artist but do so with candid and unabridged humour.

Another larger edition etching to be published in 2006 was ‘Another Nice Etching’, edition size 150, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman.

2009 saw the publication of the signed print ‘Insult to Wallpaper’, signed on the reverse Jake and Dinos Chapman. On first inspection the image is the traditional vignette pattern popular on French wallpaper in the 19th Century, however, on closer inspection it has been transformed by Jake and Dinos Chapman, again using the motifs of their reworking of Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ etchings. The wallpaper can be hung using a normal pre-mixed starch based wallpaper paste for non-woven wallpapers.

Jake and Dino Chapman continue to work from their east London studio and although both are married, Dinos making music on his days off and Jake writing essays and short stories, they are still the reigning enfants terribles of contemporary British art.