The contemporary art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman, are exhibiting in the town in which they grew up in major new show at the Jerwood Gallery. The exhibition, has been crowd funded through the Art Fund’s new ‘Art Happens platform’, and will feature previously unseen works by the artists, and will include new pieces made exclusively for the exhibition.
The Chapman brothers are known for their provocative and often confrontational art. The exhibition is titled ‘In the Realm of the Unmentionable’ and will continue the the artists’ exploration of issues surrounding consumer culture, Western identity and human mortality that has often been central to their work.
The brothers’ are also known for their reworking of Goya etchings and Victorian paintings in their Family Portrait series; for this exhibition the Chapman’s will be sourcing artworks from antique and junk shops in Hastings, these antiques will then be ‘fixed’ for the exhibition.
Jake Chapman says: “Working on someone else’s work optimises the idea that making art is a destructive rather than a creative act, which is pretty much what we are about…. I think that Hastings will be interesting as a possible resource for source material because there’s lots of stuff that might have a certain melancholic aesthetic to it which we can mess around with.”
The exhibition will take over the entire ground floor of the gallery, and will be the largest exhibition of contemporary art at the gallery to date. Alongside the show will be an unusual programme of events.
Part of the exhibition will include the opportunity for the public to get inked by the brothers in a live tattooing event. The Brothers’ will be turning viewers into permanent artworks – any tattooed individual will be transformed into a piece of contemporary art by the Chapman’s – for life; or at least until the transfer wears off.
Art Happens was launched in June 2014 on the Art Fund website to help UK museums raise money for new, small-scale, and achievable and highly creative projects. Jerwood Gallery’s Chapman Brothers exhibition is the second project to have been successfully funded through this crowd-funding initiative. In the Realm of the Unmentionable 7 January 2015.