BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice

The exhibition “Jake & Dinos Chapman. In the Realm of the Senseless” featured a selection of works by artists belonging to a generation surrounded by an aura of scandal, dubbed by the critics “Young British Artists”. These included: two vitrines from their famous “Fucking Hell” series, dozens of graphic prints from various periods, snuff-movie style videos filmed in the artists' workshop and three sculptures representing complex sexual machineries. The exhibition catalogue contains colour reproductions of these works, as well as a text by curator Rod Mengham and an extensive interview with the artists.
Black permeates its graphic design, suiting the concept of the exhibition, in which the audience is invited to assume a role of voyeur, delighting in the forbidden, disgusting sight of a massacre and violence with impunity.

Marta Lisok

The Chapman brothers have created some of the most powerful and challenging artworks of the last two decades, including sculptures, installations, paintings, etchings, films and performances. Their output has covered many of the most important traditional themes of western art, but always with a topical urgency and unparalleled inventiveness. They are now perhaps best-known for their ‘Hell’ vitrines and their series of etchings after Goya, ‘The Disasters of War’, and both of these projects feature in the exhibition at the Rondo Sztuki gallery in Katowice. Their work has engaged repeatedly with the after-effects of atrocity, injustice and abuses of power, but always with an unsettling mixture of outrage and comedy, elegy and farce.  Their dual career has been one long act of subversion, a sustained critique of the age that is both intellectually and viscerally disturbing.

Dr. Rod Mengham
Jesus College, Cambridge, curator

• Organizers