Chapman Brothers Giant Colouring Book

The Chapman Brothers Giant Colouring Book is on display at the Campbell Works gallery, and continues to highlight their position as two of the most disturbing artists in the contemporary artworld. With their unusual take on the creative colouring books of children, Jake and Dinos Chapman have created a dark and chaotic world.

Renowned for creating works that reflect the more unusual and unpleasant side of the unconcious, the Chapman Brothers remain two artists who stil have the power to shock, disturb and trangress within their art. Treading a fine line between obscene and grotesque, the Chapman Brothers Giant Colouring Book is another example of their ability to find the unpleasant, the gothic and the disturbing in almost any innocuous picture.

Many pieces by Jake and Dinos Chapman feature established pieces of art that they then deface with their own designs. By adding to existing artworks the brothers create new territory and command new meanings from these one sided collaborations. 19 out of the 21 pieces on show in the Chapman Brothers Giant Colouring Book use this kind of methodology to create monstrous etchings on top of the childlike cartoons. By adding their own drawings on top of the dot to dot style depictions, they are at once avoiding the prescriptions of the colouring book, and at the same time making reference to them.

On every page of the Giant Colouring Book there is a grotesque or disturbing etching of monsterous characters, surreal beings and macabre landscapes. All based loosely around the dot to dot points, the etchings at first appear frightening, but on closer inspection reveal nothing altogether too disturbing. The great unsettling feeling is created in the Chapman Brothers Giant Colouring Book is achieved by the very adult style improvisational art depicted on a child's prescriptive drawing aid.

Densely packed, surreal and unpleasantly hallucinagenic feeling, the etchings rise off the paper as if they have a life of their own now that they are free to the Chapman's pens. Again ignoring the childlike background of the colouring book, the drawings make great art historical references, subverting artists all the way from medieval scribe's illustrations up to Picasso.

Accompanying the Chapman Brothers Giant Colouring Book is an artists in residence exhibition, entitled You Turn. Running at the same time as the Jake and Dinos show, the artists are creating work in response to the exhibition, and even inviting visitors to the gallery to participate in their projects too.

A chance to revel in the weird, wildness of the Chapman Brothers' work and to get creative yourself, the Giant Colouring Book exhibition is on show until Sunday 14th September 2008.

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