Jake and Dino Chapman My Giant Colouring Book

About

Even today, when everything in art is supposedly permitted, the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman still has the whiff of scandal and transgression. Their obsession with the ‘dark', chaotic imagery of the unconscious, where unreason rules, is re-enforced by a consummate mastery of traditional skills in whatever medium they deploy. The Chapman Brothers' work has subverted the tradition of transcriptions, a respectful and integral art historical process, by defacing many works by great masters in order to create new territory. 19 of the 21 images are based loosely on join-the-dots drawings from children's picture books. These have triggered surrealistic interventions, improvised monstrous creatures, fantastic landscapes and macabre incidents, deviating wildly from the prescribed dot-to-dot formation. Dinos has said that they ‘are about how wrong you could make an image. How you could use nodal points and ignore them at the same time'.