Chapman Brothers @ Serpentine

The Serpentine Gallery is hosting a free retrospective of the Chapman Brother's huge body of work. For those of you who love them, this is great for you - it has a little taster from a number of their series, including Fucking Hell and One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved. The room is scattered with their Klu Klux Klan 

inspired figures, and even though they are wearing stripped socks and Birkenstocks, they are still oddly menacing to be around. 

The Fucking Hell series inspired pieces are mesmerizing - it is so easy to stand in front of them for hours. You can see so much, and once you think you've seen it all, you see even more that you hadn't noticed before. The fact that there are several of these scattered around the room means you could be staying in the gallery for a dangerously long time. The best bit is trying to find the deformed creatures in amongst the savagely brutal scenes. The Chapman Brothers are clearly influenced by Nazi Germany and Hitler, with many of the tiny plastic character in the scenes have swastikas stuck to their arms. In 2008 they held an exhibition at the White Cube gallery of alleged watercolors by Adolf Hitler that they had drawn over, an interesting concept that I wish had been shown in this exhibition. 

Surrounding these huge cabinets of figures there are the artistically vandalised paintings from the One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved series, eerily staring out from their deformed face. I love this series hugely, I think it's such a clever idea to think that because they person has deceased and everyone they know has deceased and their portrait is being sold on, they are genuinely no longer loved. This is how the Chapman Brothers justify their vandalism, and it oddly makes sense. The portraits themselves are just so creepy, with missing eyes and melting faces and dissolving features. The ones that are of children are the scariest. And the saddest. 

Whilst its good to see the Chapman Brothers most influential works, it's also nice to see their clear influence from Goya. This has always interested me about the Chapman Brothers - their love of Goya. From the general feel of the room, it definitely has been influenced by it - dark colours and dark themes of war and death. /

This exhibition is open until February and definitely something that I would go back to to spend more time at. It is small but it is a beautiful little summary.