Chapman brothers look back at a life of 'bad art'
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Your support makes all the difference.When Jake and Dinos Chapman set up shop to paint a £4,500 portrait every 20 minutes at the giant Frieze art fair this autumn, the experience had its obvious financial compensations.
But it proved so gruelling an ordeal that they have commemorated it by recreating the garret-like studio complete with palettes, easels and finished works as an installation in their major new mid-career retrospective at Tate Liverpool.
It will be the only showing of Painting for Pleasure and Profit: A piece of site-specific performance-based body art in oil, canvas and wood (dimensions variable) (2006) before the 125 paintings are dispersed to the people who paid for them.
But Jake Chapman admitted: "It was extremely unpleasant. It was pornographic." Under normal circumstances, he and his brother could render themselves impervious to the workings of the market and its collectors but the Frieze exercise put them right in the heart of it. The installation is one of several new works in the exhibition which spans around 15 years of the brothers' work. Key pieces include Disasters of War (1993), a three-dimensional re-working of Francisco Goya's etchings; and Like a Dog Returns to Its Vomit (2005), which incorporated the back catalogue of their graphic works.
Christoph Grunenberg, Tate Liverpool's director, said it was "surprising" the artists had not enjoyed a full-scale mid-career retrospective before. "Once you get beyond the surface shock of the work, you do realise it's incredibly intelligent and quite deep with big subjects of sex, death, the human capacity for violence and war."
Jake Chapman was torn in what he thought of the show. "I'm really pleased, but I would hope to give off a certain amount of modesty about the thing," he said.
"I'm sure it's the same with anybody who produces anything, anyone who writes or makes music, the reason you continue is because what you've produced isn't enough or it's an approximation to an idea or a failure of an idea. When you look at a retrospective, it's the sum total of everything that has forced you to feel that it's necessary to continue."
'Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People', supported by The Henry Moore Foundation and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, opens at Tate Liverpool today and runs until 4 March. Admission £5/£4
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