Jake Chapman Turntable Gallery, Grimsby 10 September – 8 October
In one shop window along Grimsby’s towncentre Victoria Street, two dioramas revolve atop paired white plinths. A distracted passerby might think that a miniature wargaming shop has recently opened. A closer look at the apocalyptic horror depicted suggests a Chapman brother has arrived; in Hell Souvenir 1 and 2 (all works 2022), miniature toy figures reenact scenes of human depravity, albeit with Nazis, Klan members and capitalist icon Ronald Mcdonald as the victims. Further in hang Annihilation Extinction, large cloth banners with smiley faces below the titular slogan, one seemingly at odds with the other.
, at maverick newcomer Turntable Gallery, is Jake Chapman’s second show as a solo artist, and premieres a new work appropriating George Grosz’s 1928 satirical print portfolio Hintergrund, made in reaction to the German artist’s experience of the Great War. Grosz was tried for this ‘insult’ to the German government and the church, leading to many of the prints being destroyed, but one complete portfolio has rested in Chapman’s plan chest for years.
The Chapman Brothers had previously defaced Goya etchings and Hitler watercolours; here the original Hintergrund’s 17 monochrome prints have been coloured-in by Jake using watercolour hues to create, in the artist’s words, ‘a deviation upon the deviant’: in Bald wieder: “Je grausamer, je humaner” a plume of colour emerges from a hose held by a skeleton, positing a deceptive sense of cheer. Grosz’s original depicted the undead with a gas cannister poised to fire in a no man’s land, while Chapman’s saccharine colour choices add frenzy to the composition. In Wolfür?, a bright rainbow now rises above a large pile of human skulls; Chapman’s amendment is chilling in the lack of optimism and hope commonly associated with this symbol.
On the surface, the work in this solo show appears indistinguishable from the Chapman Brothers’ collaborative output. Spending time with , however, I came to modify my opinion that Chapman has a ‘parasitic’ approach to making art, where both physical and interpretative ‘harm’ is caused to the appropriated artist’s work. Chapman’s scratchy marks on top of Grosz’s drawing of one soldier stabbing another in Mit Herz und Hand für’s Vaterland might have been produced when distractedly cleaning a paintbrush or in frenzied passion, but they do furnish schizophrenic and psychological undertones, amplifying the original drawn content and adding to its meaning. I left the gallery more convinced that Chapman is engaged in a productive conversation with Grosz’s work. Here, the contemporary artist contributes generative possibilities to the deceased artist’s work that are more sensitive to the original than I have seen in the Chapmans’ collaborative work. It is timely that Chapman has decided to work on these images now. The rise of the contemporary right, alongside the current conflict in Ukraine, suggests our society would do well to return to the testimony of those such as Grosz.