Dinos Chapman:20 years as Britart's enfant terrible

Dinos Chapman: 20 years as Britart’s enfant terrible

Dinos Chapman is usually seen as the more reserved half of the Chapman Brothers, the notorious duo of the 1990s Brit Art movement. For decades, the press has portrayed them as corruptors of taste and dealers in perversity, yet this notoriety has become central to their public image.

Brit Art’s “Naughty Boys”

In the 1990s British art scene, the Chapmans were tagged as the “Naughty Boys” of Brit Art, gaining a reputation for work that mixed provocation, dark humour and explicit imagery. Their pieces have often been condemned as mind‑polluting and morally corrosive, but this hostility only reinforced their role as emblematic enfants terribles of contemporary British art.

Public perception and controversy

The brothers are widely associated with controversy, regularly accused of making art whose sole aim is to shock. Over the years, stories circulated of journalists being ejected from their studio for asking unwelcome questions, feeding the myth of the Chapmans as aggressively confrontational figures.

Attitude to the audience

Conventional opinion suggests that the abrasive qualities of their work spill over into their personalities, manifesting as arrogance and a taste for conflict. They have been quoted making provocative comments about who should be allowed to look at art, at one point bluntly excluding children from their imagined audience.

“When people talk about our work, the thing they sometimes forget is that it’s 99% funny and 1% whatever else. The most obvious thing about it is that it’s funny, and what’s funny about it is that people want to take it seriously.”

Humour, horror and defence

Dinos Chapman repeatedly stresses that humour is the core of their practice, even when the work is saturated with violence, obscenity or grotesque imagery. He argues that to treat pieces like Fuck Face (a child mannequin with a phallic nose) as solemn or earnest is to misunderstand how satire and black comedy function in their art.

“Essentially, the thing that binds everything together is humour – the darkest kind of humour possible. Because that’s the way that you defend yourself from the horror.”

This view echoes Sigmund Freud’s analysis of humour as a psychological defence, where laughter shields the ego from the brutality of reality. Dinos reformulates this idea in stark, physical terms: if you can laugh at someone as they hurt you, the power dynamic shifts and their violence loses some of its force.

Sculptural worlds of decay and violence

Many Chapman sculptures present decaying bodies, mutilation and baroque sadism, yet they are staged with an over‑the‑top theatricality that invokes splatter films and pop‑culture horror clichés. Works like Sturm und Drang take motifs such as clowns, severed heads and maggot‑ridden forms and push them into a realm that is both repulsive and absurdly camp.

The same impulse drives dioramas like Fucking Hell, a miniature inferno where thousands of Nazi figures torture and annihilate one another in scenes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch filtered through tabletop war‑gaming. After the 2004 Momart warehouse fire destroyed this piece, the Chapmans did not simply recreate it; instead they produced new, related works such as The Sum of all Evil, recombining and intensifying their hellish imagery.

Recycling loss and rivalry

The Momart fire also consumed Tracey Emin’s tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a key icon of the Young British Artists generation. In a characteristically barbed move, the Chapmans remade Emin’s destroyed work under the title The Same only Better, presenting it alongside their own reconstructed infernal scenes.

This gesture folds artistic rivalry, past trauma and dark humour into a single act, highlighting their ongoing fascination with destruction and resurrection in art. By re‑animating lost works in altered form, they underline the instability of artistic “masterpieces” and the ease with which cultural memory can be vandalised or rewritten.

Bleak worldview behind the jokes

Beneath the ribald jokes and grotesque surface, Dinos Chapman presents a consistently pessimistic picture of the world. Even the most playful aspects of their practice sit atop a bleak conviction that existence is fundamentally cruel, a stance that gives their humour its poisonous edge.

“The idea of making hopeful, friendly art is a total nonsense to me, because generally the world is a horrible place.”

This unapologetic bleakness is crucial to the impact of their exhibitions: the viewer is seduced by theatrical excess and comic vulgarity, only to be confronted with an underlying sense of futility and doom. For the Chapmans, laughter and horror are inseparable, locked together as twin responses to a world they see as irredeemably hostile.

Author’s summary: A portrait of Dinos Chapman reveals an artist who fuses grotesque spectacle, vicious humour and unflinching pessimism into a singular, unsettling vision of late‑20th‑century British art.

Crack Magazine — 2025-11-25