Goya's modernity has never exhausted itself; he was as immediate to Picasso and Dali as he was to Manet; of all pre-modern artists, he is the one who most resembles a modernist. This is who the Chapmans have victimised.

Jake cites Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. "Freud wrote that primary instincts are driven out of children for the sake of secondary gains. I may want to kill someone who is in my way on a bus, but it's better to ask them politely to move aside. Politeness gives me a secondary gain. That's what civilisation is like." So, in his art, is he trying to point out that beneath the veneer of civilisation we're all seething ids and repressed psychotics? "I don't think artists can do anything. An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, 'Our art is potty-training for adults.' He got that about right." The Chapman brothers are trying to help grown-ups be more civilised? "We're not here to help," he giggles. "We certainly don't care about moral instruction. Our interest in morality is not in being moralists, but in how morality works as a functional pacifier." Many of their shows offer titles that are as provocative as the artworks themselves, such as The Blind Leading The Blind (Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague), In the Realm of the Senseless (Artur, Istanbul, Turkey), To Live and Think Like Pigs (UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, USA) or SHITROSPECTIVE (Contemporary Fine Arts Galerie, Berlin). curatorluc tuymans next to caravaggio’s ‘david with the head of goliath’, post 1606, at fondazione prada, milan The brothers' first joint work is also their first tribute to Francisco Goya, an artist that they have continued to reference throughout their careers. This piece is a three-dimensional representation of Goya's etchings of the same name made in miniature using toy soldiers. Goya's etchings depicted the atrocities of war experienced during the Napoleonic invasions of his native Spain in 1808 including gruesome scenes of bayonetting, beheading, torture, and death. Goya's work provided such a powerful polemic, that it could not be exhibited in his lifetime

The Chapmans have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century which has rediscovered evil. And I have fallen into their trap. Hell is riddled with detail, but no one bit is more significant than any other: it’s equally horrific. Every act is occurring at the same second. It’s a snapshot, one mass moment of nastiness. The process of making it was the whole point: even if you create something out of 60,000 Nazi figures, it’s still nowhere near the actual thing it’s referring to. Two years of work making 60,000 little soldiers – and the Nazis were able to murder 60,000 Russian PoWs in six hours. It's not about the Holocaust. It’s the Nazis who are being subjected to industrial genocide Jake Chapman It occurred to us that the Chapmans are the artists who have best captured and reflected the artistic and ethical criticisms contained in Goya’s prints,” Lola Durán. It's all very sophisticated. The next day I see the images. I think they are brilliant and profound. Oh dear. Somehow, they do not destroy, but find something new in the Disasters of War. The Chapmans use the word "evil" to describe the atmosphere that pervaded their recent ethnographic show; there is a wild sense of evil in what they've done to Goya. The altered prints make you think a serial killer with an addiction to drawing psychotic clown faces has got into the British Museum's prints and drawings room - like the killer in Red Dragon who eats an original Blake.

The Chapman brothers have been working together since the early 1990s. Their art is deliberately confrontational, engaging with such inflammatory subjects and Nazism, the holocaust and religion, while it exploits an aesthetic of obscenity and horror. They appropriate elements from the history of art and philosophical and sociological theory to produce a body of work that derives much of its power from being politically and morally ambiguous, wilfully resisting straightforward interpretation. Iakovos “Jake” Chapman (born 1966) and Konstantinos “Dinos” Chapman (born 1962) are from London, UK. They are the children of an English art teacher and an orthodox Greek Cypriot: Dinos studied at the Ravensbourne College of Art (1980–83), Jake at the North East London Polytechnic (1985–88) before both together enrolled at the Royal College of Art (1988–90), when they also worked as assistants to the artists Gilbert and George. They’ve taken Goya’s message – that war can’t be justified, that violence can’t be justified – and transformed it and built on it.” The individual works draw on a range of sources, one of the carvings, for instance, mimics Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938), but here it is topped by a red-haired mask of Ronald McDonald. This can be interpreted as a comment on Modernism's appropriation of so-called "primitive'" art. As with all the Chapmans's works, it is full of contradictions and the installation can be interpreted in a number of ways - for example it can be read as a critique of the display of ethnographic items as aesthetic objects rather than pieces imbued with social and historical meaning. In a wider sense it can also be seen as a criticism of colonialism and globalization, although this could be an over-simplification as the brothers have declared that the world is "a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated". So we've gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings," continues Dinos, "and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads."By bringing together Goya's eighty-three part series of etchings into one entity, in which all parts are simultaneously visible, the Chapmans' Disasters of War suggests a reduction and encapsulation of events of momentous emotional impact. The tiny size and anodyne manufactured appearance of the figures transform the horror of the original material into the representation of a war among toys, a comic-strip rendition of brutality. Both the large white plinth, which provides a broad margin between the figures and the viewer, and the perspex box, which seals the figures off from the viewer, add to the reductive and distancing effects of the work. The Chapmans have said: 'We fantasise about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia' (quoted in Unholy Libel, p.149). This work, like their subsequent Hell 2000 (Saatchi Collection, London), stages a neurotic fixation with an ironic edge: the hours of careful work required to cut up and reconstitute the little figures to represent grotesque human acts in a time of social uncontrol. Disasters of War reflects the detachment of Western societies from the realities of war-time killing, both through computer and missile technology (which have produced weapons that fire long range and permit operational distance) and through the comfortable spectatorship provided by television and the film industry. Aside from a shared art practice, each brother also has an extracurricular activity. Jake is, apparently, an enthusiastic writer of philosophical and critical texts; Dinos, meanwhile, is an unexpectedly accomplished recording artist. Last year saw his debut, Luftbobler, released on the Vinyl Factory label. A kind of techno album, Throbbing Gristle, Autechre and Aphex were all audible, luftbobbling around. It’s disarmingly good. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. Martin Maloney, 'The Chapman Bros.: When will I be Famous', Flash Art, no.186, Jan.-Feb. 1996, pp.64-7, reproduced (colour, detail) p.67 Many of the brothers' works have their basis in the art of others, of particular inspiration are the etchings of Goya, which the Chapmans recreated in miniature in Disasters of War (1993) and as a life-size sculpture in Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994). Later, they directly appropriated original artwork, adding to and painting over the etchings of Goya, watercolors by Adolf Hitler, and 18 th and 19 th century oils.

Ultimately, she says, "What I think this work is all about is waking us up, so we don't sleepwalk our way through 21st Century life." The Chapman Brothers have embraced this role as provocateurs, with an energy and humour that makes their works alternately affronting and highly amusing. In their words: “If you look at the genealogy of our work beginning with the first Goya prints we used, we got the book, we chopped it up, then we got the little soldiers and we chopped them up. It’s art as a creative and a destructive act, but, in our case, it’s definitely more destructive.” Significant exhibitions of their work include the Young British Artists (YBA) showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. They were nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 2003 but lost out to Grayson Perry. This is pure Freud; in a 1927 essay, Humour, he asserted that, “Humour has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation… the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” As Dinos puts it, “If you can laugh at someone while they’re beating your head in, they’re not beating your head in.”The Chapman brothers have worked as a collaborative team since the early 1990s. Disasters of War was their first major work. It is a one in thirty-second-scale model based on a portfolio of etchings by Goya (Fransisco de Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1819), of the same title, depicting the atrocities of war experienced and witnessed during and after the Napoleonic invasions of Spain in 1808. Goya's eighty-three etchings contain scenes of brutality and horror such as bayonetting, mutilation and decapitation. The Chapmans have translated each of the etchings into a three-dimensional tableau made of hybrid toy figures which have been pieced together from various sources and painted over. Goya's dark settings have been replaced by clumps of simulated grass of the type used in architectural models. Each miniature scene is set on a grass-covered island of irregular form; the islands are clustered together on a large white plinth and covered by a perspex box. The Chapman Family Collection is one of a number of works by the artists that make reference to McDonalds; others include The Rape of Creativity 1999 (private collection), Rhizome 2000 (private collection) and Arbeit McFries 2001 (Tate L03203). in luc tuymans’ vision, caravaggio was the first to transcend classical and mannerist tradition thanks to the psychological realism expressed by his innovative pictorial language; he also embodied the spirit of the baroque artist and the wish to communicate with the public through the power of representation. Controversy is one thing but I think the seriousness of the work will go unnoticed. That’s the thing. One of the things that’s never discussed is the seriousness of the work.”

Jake and I decided beforehand that we were going to make a monstrous failure. It was intentionally unmagnificent and unrewarding. We used the most pathetic way of representing the thing that has most exorcised western civilisation. We had a few assistants, but Jake and I did the donkey work. I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was clumsy and inaccurate Dinos Chapman Our next Artists You Need To Know are Jake and Dinos Chapman who are known as the Chapman Brothers. Many of the works created by the Chapman Brothers’ are installations, or three dimensional environments with multiple facets and nuances. In light of this, we’re sharing a number of videos of their exhibitions, to offer a more complete sense of their art and aesthetic. Their goading is encouraged by the national attitude towards contemporary art, for which the artists have to shoulder some, if not most, of the blame. As part of the YBA crowd, they’re responsible for its popularisation in this country and the elevation of its appreciation (and criticism) to a national pastime. It’s their own fault if “what’s happened recently is that everyone has become interested in art, but generally at an unqualified level.”The Chapmans' series is from a - historically very significant - edition published directly from Goya's plates in 1937, as a protest against fascist atrocities in the Spanish civil war; its frontispiece is a photograph of bomb damage to the Goya Foundation. Given how important the Disasters of War were to Picasso, Dali and the image of the civil war, this is clearly an important, evocative, emotionally raw thing, and they have scribbled all over it. His depictions of torture, rape, starvation and execution have long fascinated the British artists, informing their work and eventually leading them to inform his. Goya's Disasters of War is a precocious modern masterpiece, a work left by its creator as his final savage bequest to the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries - it was far too anti-clerical and unpatriotic to be published in his lifetime, and the first ever edition came out in 1863, three and a half decades after his death in 1828. From the very start of its public existence, it has been experienced not as a historic but as a contemporary work, its images so urgent and truthful that they function as living, new art.