Description
The brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, considered to be among the leading exponents of Young British Art, have worked together since studying respectively at the University of East London and the Royal College of Art. They won popularity in 1990 with their work Insult of Injury, which reconstructs scenes from "The Disasters of War" by Francisco Goya using miniature plastic figures shaped and painted by hand. Privileging the use of plastic materials and glass fiber to create horrific scenes of deformed or mutilated manikins and mini figures, the artists display a fascination, not without irony, for deformity, horror, violence, and pornography, expressed in the tiniest details in their sculptures, drawings, and etchings. In "Tragic Anatomies" (1996), groups of manikins of children, variously coupled together and mutilated, like the fruit of obscene genetic experiments, are placed in everyday situations on synthetic flowering lawns. In Piggyback as well, there is an evident intention to disturb the viewer by calling into question the values of morality and normality. This is in keeping with the idea that the function of an artwork is to raise questions about the terms and conditions of its own existence.