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.