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’.

Campbell Works presents ’My Giant Colouring Book’ as part of a national touring programme developed by the Hayward Gallery with assistance from Arts Council England.

See also related project You Turn

Jake & Dinos Chapman
My Giant Colouring Book

Saturday, 16 August 2008 – Sunday, 14 September 2008

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 un-reason rules, is re-enforced by a consummate mastery of traditional skills in whatever medium they deploy.

Taking The Chapman Brothers series of ethching, My Giant Colouring Book as a starting point, Neil Taylor & Harriet Murray created a curatorial project centered around the Chapmans work by builing a child size gallery space within their gallery in order to re appropriate a context for the work sympathetic to its source, a ‘childrens colouring book’. This exhibition was then used as a starting point for a 10 week long art project, that included free daily painting classes for local children alongside three week long residencies by practicing professional artists. The culmination of the project was an exhibition of the childrens work and the resident artists work in a parallel exhibition called YouTurn, that ended with an auctioner from sotherby’s performing on a rostrum to auction all the works to raise funds to pay for the Chapman exhibition fees.

Resident artists included

Shaun Doyle & Mally Mallinson, James Unsworth, Neil Taylor & Harriet Murray

Share This