Hell

The Chapman brothers emerged in the nineties as major British artists attracting enormous attention and controversy with such works as Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994), based on a sculptural recreation of a scene from Goya's The Disasters of War. Their work questioned commonly assumed values about art and its relationship to the public and to history. They created a series of sculptures of apparently mutant figures with such titles as DNA Zygotic (1997), a multi-headed monster, and Tragic Anatomies (1996), an AstroTurf garden of mutant creatures like a contemporary scene from Bosch. Their nightmare vision culminated in a huge tableau of Hell (1998-2000), a landscape filled with hundreds of figures committing every imaginable atrocity, which forms the centrepiece to this book. More recently they have invented a pseudo-anthropological collection of tribal objects dedicated to the fast-food chain McDonald's. Their fascination with Goya has continued with the creation of their own coloured version of The Disasters, an exquisite but hideous tour-de-force.