Liverpool Artwork of The Day – Wednesday January 10 2007
Detail from Sex I, 2003. Painted Bronze. By Jake and Dinos Chapman
Currently on show at Tate Liverpool as part of the Chapman Brothers ‘Bad Art For Bad People’ exhibition
Maybe this one would have been good to save for Halloween but its in the Tate now and you should go and see it now.
This just shows a small detail from a large bronze piece which is a reworking (one of many) of their ‘Great Deeds Against The Dead’ 1994
Quoting Christopher Turner from his article in Tate Etc.
Almost a decade after their first Great Deeds Against the Dead, the Chapmans created another version. They seemed finally to have made Goya’s image their own, unpicking it and transforming it into a seething mass of decomposition. Sex I (2003) resembles the extravagant images of death that are constructed in papier mâché in Mexico to celebrate the Day of the Dead. It shows Goya’s three rotting victims being licked clean by an army of insects and slithery creatures that come in waves of putrefaction; a swarm of maggots, snails, flies, rats and spiders, each one a prop acquired from a Halloween shop and individually cast in bronze. A sated raven sits menacingly at the top of the tree.
Lovely. Worth a closer look.
Bad Art For Bad People at Tate Liverpool. December 15 2006 to March 4 2007