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Chapman Brother's Hell is rising from ashes
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent29 May 2008
Four years ago, Hell, an apocalyptic sculpture by Jake and Dinos Chapman, was destroyed in the infamous Momart warehouse fire in east London.
But now it has risen from the ashes in a new version, Fucking Hell, unveiled by the artist brothers at the White Cube gallery in Mayfair today.
The work comprises nine glass cases packed with thousands of Nazi figures and mutated animals in insane, grotesque panoramas. It includes Adolf Hitler himself, an amateur artist as well as a tyrannical murderer, recording the scenes at his easel, and has already been sold for £7.5 million to an unnamed buyer.
And for a second new work, the brothers have taken some of the Nazi leader's own authenticated watercolours and defaced them with the likes of multicoloured rainbows to create new works of art.
The series of 13 Hitler pictures are to be sold as a single work, entitled If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be, for £685,000 against the £115,000 spent on acquiring them. White Cube pledged they would be careful who they were sold to.
Tim Marlow, the gallery's director of exhibitions, said: "We always look at who we sell works to anyway." The works were not designed to offend, he added. "If people think they're trying to exploit the Hitler thing, they would have grounds for concern, but it's an act of annihilation. They can't be traded now as Hitler."
Both new pieces continue the brothers' dual obsession with the darkest side of humanity and with art history. Jake Chapman said they wanted to re-make Hell "to rescue the work from the sentimentality" that surrounded it when it burned.
They refused to succumb to the "whingeing" surrounding the blaze because "we couldn't fail to see something funny about Hell being on fire. If you look at the humour in our work, it would be uncharacteristic of us not to see it as funny".
He quipped: "The idea of a world without Hell was unacceptable to us."
And the Hitler pictures continued their exploration of art history. The brothers have previously defaced series of prints by the Spanish artist Goya. "Making art is necessarily destructive of the art that precedes it," Jake said.
Asked whether the works might upset people including the Jewish community, he dismissed the idea that they had become more offensive by the Chapmans' work on them. "In themselves, they're not offensive, because they're so awful," he said. Although "you can't help but look for some clue to the pathology that will blossom later," this was the wrong way to view them.
