Jake and Dinos Chapman (b. 1966 & b. 1962)

Jake and Dinos Chapman (b. 1966 & b. 1962)
Bring Me the Head of...
fibreglass, resin, paint and wig
16 x 12 x 12in. (40.7 x 30.5 x 30.5cm.)
Executed in 1994, this work is number one from an edition of fifteen

Provenance:
Karsten Schubert, London.
Private Collection, London.

Exhibited:
London, Ridinghouse Editions, Bring Me the Head of Franco Toselli!, 1995 (another from the edition exhibited).
London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Chapmanworld, 1996-1997 (another from the edition exhibited; illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Graz, Grazer Kunstverein and Berlin, Kunst-Werke.
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Dinos & Jake Chapman: Six Feet Under, 1997, pl. XXVIII (another from the edition exhibited; illustrated in colour, unpaged)
Salzburg, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Sex and the British - Slap and Tickle, 2000 (another from the edition exhibited). This exhibition later travelled to Paris, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
London, Shapero Modern, Rack 'Em Up: British Contemporary Editions, 1990-2000, 2015 (another from the edition exhibited).

Literature:
Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, exh. cat., Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, 2006 (illustrated in colour, p. 98).

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Specialist Notes:

Jake and Dinos Chapman's Bring Me the Head of... is one of the most notorious icons of Young British Art. The work references the Milan gallerist Franco Toselli who, in 1994 was scheduled to exhibit the artists’ work Mummy and Daddy Chapman, but upon receiving the two mannequins with genitalia sprouting all over their naked bodies, he refused to show it. In revenge, the brothers remodelled the head of ‘Daddy Chapman’, substituting a dildo for his nose, and recast it in fibreglass. The sculpture featured in the artists’ film Bring Me the Head, 1995 and both works were exhibited at Ridinghouse Editions, London that year. Another Bring Me the Head of... from the edition is held in the permanent collection of Tate, London.

Decapitation and castration are frequent themes in the Chapmans’ practice which, finds roots in Sigmund Freud’s 1920 essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, linking sex and death. The title also finds derivation in the Biblical tale of Salome and John the Baptist. When Salome danced for her stepfather, King Herod, he was so pleased he promised her whatever she wished. Prompted by her mother Herodias, Salome asked for the head of John the Baptist, who was subsequently decapitated. While the story has been a popular subject for painters since the Renaissance, the Chapmans re-imaging of the potential horror of the subject’s hewn off head, subverts the tragedy through the banality of fake eroticism. Of their intent the artists note, 'When our sculptures work they achieve the position of reducing the viewer to a state of absolute moral panic... they're completely troublesome objects' (J. and D. Chapman, quoted in D. Fogle, 'A Scatological Aesthetic for the Tired of Seeing', in Chapmanworld, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1996, unpaged).

This work is featured in our How to Collect like a Tate Curator article – find out more here.

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