Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman work for Gilbert & George

Jake and Dinos Chapman are the Iakovos brothers ‘Jake’ Chapman, born in 1966 in Cheltenham, and Konstantinos ‘Dinos’ Chapman, born in 1962 in London. They owed their relationship to the fine arts to their father, an art teacher, and the names Iakovos and Konstantinos to their mother, an Orthodox Greek Cypriot. Jake and Dinos initially studied at different universities: Dinos at Ravensbourne College of Art (1980-83) and Jake at Northeast London Polytechnic (1985-88), before they both enrolled at the Royal College of Art (1988-90). There they worked as assistants to the artist pair Gilbert & George and finally decided to also build a career together as artists. Provocation was evident in the brother’s work from early on: One of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s first works consisted of 83 torture and mutilation scenes referencing the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) and his famous cycle Disasters of War.

Penis-noses, anus mouths, and inverted swastikas

Jake and Dinos Chapman worked above all with plastic human models or fiberglass mannequins which they presented in sometimes drastic arrangements to an often shocked audience. In many cases, the figures are naked and only dressed in trainers, with genitals instead of faces, anus mouths and penis noses. This sometimes seems infantile, but it has a system. The Chapman’s created one of their most famous works in the years 1996 to 2000: Hell was made up of nine vitrines arranged in the form of an upturned swastika containing over 30,000 small naked or grotesquely mutilated figures indulging in the most heinous atrocities. The work caused outrage before it was acquired by the art collector Charles Saatchi (born 1943); it was destroyed, however, in a fire in 2004. 

Butterflies and stars for Hitler’s watercolours

Jake and Dinos Chapman often referenced the art of earlier eras with their work; references can be found to Goya as well as Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), William Blake (1757-1827), Nicolaus Poussin (1594-1665) and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). The 1851 painting Monarch of the Glen by the English landscape and animal painter Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) was revisited by the brothers in 1995 with their sculpture Übermensch which showed the disabled scientist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) on the edge of a precipice. In 2008 they presented a series of authentic works by Adolf Hitler which they had decorated with stars, rainbows and further hippie motifs. The iconic advertising figure of the fast-food chain McDonald’s, the clown Ronald McDonald, also found his way into the dazzling artworld of the Chapmans. Despite all the controversies about their work, Jake and Dinos Chapman were nominated for the renowned Turner Prize in 2003, but lost to Grayson Perry (born 1960).

Jake and Dinos Chapman announced the end of their artistic collaboration in 2022.