On View
Gallery Hopping: Jake and Dinos Chapman Make Paris Comeback at Kamel Mennour
They revisit works lost in the East London warehouse fire.
Caroline Elbaor
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“Back to the End of the Beginning of the End Again,” currently on view at Kamel Mennour, Paris, is the first Parisian outing of British duo Jake and Dinos Chapman in seventeen years. Based around the 2004 East London warehouse fire that destroyed countless artworks—including the Chapman’s own sculpture Hell (1999-2000)—the show is a direct response to the piece that was destroyed.
Hell had taken the artists two years to complete, in which the two encased nearly 10,000 figurines of Nazi soldiers, appearing to be burning and suffering in Hell, within vitrines that were arranged in the shape of a swastika. “We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn,” the artists say of their initial reaction to the sculpture’s demise.
With the work Back to the End of the Beginning of the End Again—after which the show is named—Jake and Dinos Chapman revisit this concept, removing their Nazi figurines from their hellish lair to show them zombie-fied in a Ferris Wheel. In somewhat restaging their destroyed work, “One gets the strong impression that this wheel of misfortune is destined to turn with its infernal rhythm until the end of time,” says the press release.
Also on view are “cannibalized” versions of other works lost in the warehouse fire, including a Jeff Koons work in Death II, and perhaps more notably, Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963-95), cheekily restructured as and titled The Same Thing Only Better (2010).
Jake & Dinos Chapman, “Back to the End of the Beginning of the End Again,” at Kamel Mennour is on view at two venues: 47 rue Saint-André des Arts, and 28 avenue Matignon, Paris from October 14 – November 26.
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