Jake & Dinos Chapman, Come and See, Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Brothers Jake & Dinos Chapman are the most terrible of enfants in the Young British Artist movement. Famous for their intricate diorama art - and for narrowly missing out on the 2003 Turner Prize to Grayson Perry - this show at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery with be their first London retrospective in almost two decades. 

Depravity in miniature is their trademark, and Come and See promises to combine images from their full back-catalogue into a dark, whirlwind of a show featuring undead Nazis, dinosaurs, and Ronald McDonald.

Their first miniaturisation (1991) was a collection of small plastic models enacting Old Master Francisco Goya’s series of etchings The Disasters of War, which brought a grotesque faux-naivety to an already violent series of images depicting torture, disfigurement and the desecration of corpses. 

And that wasn’t the last they had to say about Goya. In 2003 they made headlines by drawing clown and cartoon heads over original prints in a Modern Art Oxford exhibition titled Insult to Injury. The Daily Telegraph noted at the time that ‘the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman have managed to raise the hackles of art historians by violating something much more sacred to the art world than the human body – another work of art.’ 

Perhaps their most famous piece is Hell (1999) - a collection of over 30,000 2-inch high figures, many in Nazi uniform, executing a catalogue of war atrocities with abandon. The power is in the detail, luring you in so that you find yourself focusing in on a small, individual act of cruelty amid the 30,000-strong in the tableaux. Not without irony, Hell was destroyed in the 2004 MOMART warehouse fire.

They’re a duo whose modus operandi is the irresistibility of unbearable images, and this promises to be a wild, dark show. 

Admission: FREE
Address and map:  W Carriage Dr, London W2 ‎
Nearest tube: Lancaster Gate