A commented tour and catalogue launch of Jake Chapman's exhibition FLOTSAM & JETSAM with art historian and curator Otto M. Urban.
The terms flotsam and jetsam mean almost the same thing in English - floating debris. Except for a slight difference: while flotsam is the debris washed up by the sea after a shipwreck, jetsam refers to items that the crew themselves threw overboard to get rid of some of the ship's cargo in an emergency. Feelings of distress and cultural emptiness are central to contemporary British artist Jake Chapman's exhibition at the Telegraph Gallery. Chapman's work in recent years has explored not only memories of working together with his brother Dinos Chapman in the 1990s, but also the cultural memory associated with the now defunct 1960s counterculture and the existential collapse of humanity.
The central space of the gallery is occupied by a Trabant car from the communist era, whose engine starts at predetermined intervals and fills the gallery space with thick exhaust fumes that choke two commercial mannequins over and over again. Adorned with quantum diagrams, this symbol of mass consumerism stands surrounded by repurposed posters from May '68, smiley face banners, yoga-inspired paintings, as well as wood carvings of modern deities, totem masks and a mutilated snowman. The washed-up detritus of contemporary culture and an accelerationist future.
Jake Chapman came to international art scene attention in the early 1990s in London as a member of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement. Since 1991, he has collaborated with his brother Dinos Chapman, and together they have produced a number of iconic works, including large fibreglass mannequins of deformed children, paraphrases of works by Francisco Goya and William Hogarth, a series of "enhanced" watercolours of Adolf Hitler, and a spectacular installation Hell of mutilated soldier figures, which the English art critic Brian Sewell has described as the first major artwork of the twenty-first century. Since 2020, the brothers have gone their separate ways.
Curated by Mark Sanders
