
Liverpool
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
December 15, 2006–March 4, 2007
Curated by Tanya Barson and Christoph Grunenberg
One putatively verboten move after another, executed with fastidiousness and glee—that’s Jake and Dinos Chapman’s modus operandi. Retrofitting reverenced subjects with insolent supplements—such as giving child mannequins sexual organs for facial features, defacing original Goya prints in comically juvenile fashion, and creating faux-ethnographic displays with hand-carved McDonald’s logos—underscores the artists’ superiority to the scopophiliac hordes via fanatical attention to detail. The conspicuous void in this midcareer survey falls where the British brothers’ concentration camp–themed masterpiece, Hell, 1999–2000, should be (it was destroyed in the 2004 Momart fire). But the seventeen sculptures, two installations, and some three hundred paintings and prints made since 1992 will no doubt still offer a brilliantly assaulting display and a measure of our societal hang-ups.