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Blain|Southern Gallery Now Represents Jake and Dinos Chapman
They join Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud, and Lawrence Wiener on the gallery's illustrious roster.
Alyssa Buffenstein
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Blain|Southern announced yesterday that it is now representing the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. The duo has left White Cube gallery after almost 20 years to join Blain|Southern.
“Over the past two decades, the Chapman brothers have created one of the most distinctive oeuvres in contemporary art,” said the gallery in a press release.
“Their tableaux of 20th-century ruin take on everything from the fast-food industry to our culture’s preoccupation with war and violence … With their sharp wit and playful intelligence, Jake and Dinos Chapman never shy away from deflating the pieties of our age.”
The oeuvre of the Chapman brothers spans printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation. Their work can be provocative, both politically and sexually, but always with an edge of humor, and sometimes a dose of gore.
Particularly notorious is their work Hell from 2000, a swastika-shaped sculpture composed of 6,000 toy soldiers, depicting Nazis being tortured and murdered. It burned in a warehouse fire in 2004, after which they created the even-more ambitious Fucking Hell in 2008.
Their irreverent attitude is summed up well by Jake Chapman’s explanation of their reaction to the fire, as published by the Guardian in 2015: “We heard the Momart warehouse was on fire and drove up to have a giggle because we thought it was full of other YBA art. Then we got a call saying Hell was in there. We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn.”
Both received MFAs from the Royal College of Art in London in 1990, and have since had solo shows in important museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Tate Britain in London, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, besides at a number of world-renowned galleries.
In 2003, they were nominated for the Turner Prize. They currently have a solo show, “In the Realm of the Senseless,” on view at Arter in Istanbul.
The London- and Berlin-based Blain|Southern already represents blue chip artists like Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud, and Lawrence Wiener, on a roster that also includes artists like Abdoulaye Konaté, Jannis Kounellis, and Chiharu Shiota.
The gallery will announce its first exhibition with the Chapman brothers in the coming months.
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