JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN, Untitled, 2022
Edition of 10 + 1 AP
Numbered
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity
Hand knotted
Wool, Mohair, Nettle & Silk
High / Low Cut

Jake and Dinos Chapman are among the most influential figures in contemporary British art. Since the early 1990s, their collaborative practice has confronted the legacies of Enlightenment rationality, the persistence of violence, and the uneasy entanglement of culture, morality, and spectacle. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, and print, the Chapmans employ a deliberately dissonant language in which meticulous craft coexists with irreverence and darkly comic distortion.

They first drew widespread attention in 1991 with works that intervened directly in imagery derived from Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War, subjecting its harrowing scenes to acts of alteration that unsettled assumptions about authorship, historical reverence, and the fixity of meaning. This engagement with Goya has remained a recurring point of departure, allowing the artists to probe how images of suffering circulate across time and how cultural memory is continually rewritten.

The Chapmans’ broader body of work draws on diverse intellectual and visual sources—from art history and philosophy to speculative technologies and systems of classification—creating environments that oscillate between the grotesque and the absurd. Their practice resists moral resolution, instead exposing the mechanisms through which horror and humor, attraction and repulsion, are culturally mediated.

For HENZEL STUDIO, Jake and Dinos Chapman reappropriated a drawing from their series Like a Dog Returns to its Vomit Twice. In this body of work, a group of original Goya prints was “reworked and improved” by the artists, who overlaid the historic images with figures rendered in gouache and ink—molluscs, insects, animals, clowns, disembodied organs, and hybrid creatures that infiltrate and destabilize the Spanish master’s compositions. The project forms part of the Chapmans’ ongoing Rectification series, initiated in 2003, which revisits The Disasters of War as a site of both homage and disruption, foregrounding questions of restoration, violation, and the ethics of historical inheritance.

Select exhibitions and collections: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Gallery,  London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Images: (1) Untitled, 2022 (2) Untitled, 2022 (in-situ; The West Hollywood EDITION, Frieze, Los Angeles)