Jake and Dinos Chapman: My Giant Colouring Book

1 October 2011 – 8 January 2012

Image from My Giant Colouring Book © Jake and Dinos Chapman (click image for larger version)

Even today, when everything in art is supposedly permitted, the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman still has the whiff of scandal and transgression. The artists' obsession with the ‘dark’, chaotic imagery of the unconscious, where unreason rules, is re-enforced by a mastery of traditional skills.

The etchings in My Giant Colouring Book, published by Paragon Press in 2004, seem to be seething with grotesque imagery, yet on inspection they are surprisingly innocent - there is nothing here to offend an anxious parent or teacher.

19 of the 21 images are based loosely on join-the-dots drawings from children’s picture books, which were copied through photo-etching on to copper plates. The images have subsequently triggered surrealistic interventions, including improvised monstrous creatures, fantastic landscapes and macabre incidents, deviating wildly from the prescribed dot-to-dot formation. Dinos Chapman 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’.

My Giant Colouring Book offer a brilliant introduction to the imaginations of two of Britain’s most inventive and subversive artists.