Jake and Dinos Chapman

We have long been accustomed to thinking of the work of the Chapman brothers as a monad, a single unit that shares methodologies and practices through a process unknown to us. Provocateurs by profession, this time, at least according to them, they have worked separately to autonomously produce the works in the current solo show, “Jake or Dinos Chapman,” which is divided between White Cube’s two locations. I must admit that it remains difficult if not impossible to attribute work to either brother. At Mason’s Yard, viewers are welcomed by a series of semiabstract sculptures with evocative forms that bring to mind the tradition favored by the historical avant-garde. Everything seems under control, marked by an uncharacteristic political correctness. A closer look, however, fails to disappoint; indeed, viewers find themselves in the company of a singular audience: a macabre SS squad with horribly flayed faces, eyes spurting from the sockets at the sight of so much Entartete Kunst (degenerate art). At Hoxton Square, the Nazi officials are replaced by schoolchildren who admire deliberately naive paintings in burnished colors. But this apparently normal audience has somatic features altered by some theriomorphic enchantment, evocative of the Chapman brothers’ successful early works Zygotic Acceleration, 1995, and Tragic Anatomies, 1996.

In a gallery on the upper floor, paintings and statues of Catholic idols adorn spare wooden furniture. The sanctuary-like installation recalls a sort of sacristy, like those found in churches in the Italian or Spanish countryside: It is gloomy and somewhat mournful in appearance, tinged with an oppressive, almost morbid religiosity, which contrasts with the irreverent intervention on preexisting works. The works in this show confirm the research of both Chapmans, who here, in fact, achieve a wild compendium, bordering on the mannered, suspended between beauty and suffering, black humor and horror, the sublime and perversion, the childlike and the diabolical. The result is a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous visual stimuli characterized by an outrageous contamination of wide-ranging languages, styles, and contexts, from the courtly tradition of art history to popular subculture, at the intersection between history, religion, and science fiction.

This exhibition is also on view at 48 Hoxton Square until September 17.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.