The Pino Pascali Award 2010, 13th edition, has been awarded to Jake and Dinos Chapman.
Opening and award ceremony with the artists was scheduled for the 2nd of July 2010 at 20.30 at Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare (Bari) Italy, for the first Chapman Brothers solo exhibition in a public space in Italy.
The 2010 commission for the Pino Pascali Prize for Contemporary Art (Rosalba Branà – Director of the Museo Pino Pascali, Pietro Marino – Art Critic and Carlo Berardi – Art collector and curator of the exhibition) has released the following statement:
The Chapman Brothers have been able to complement the language of contemporary art with a new aesthetic vitality full of tragic beauty and raw truth. They have mapped the symbols of the irrationality of life and death, they have exposed the false consciousness of time and the fears of the human soul.
The Chapman Brothers are part of the YBAs, a generation of British artists that attained international recognition after the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997. They have taken part in major shows in the world’s foremost contemporary art institutions such as the Tate Britain in London and PS1 in New York. They were selected among the young British artists at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and their major installation Fucking Hell (2008) was featured in the exhibition Mapping the studio: works from the Francois Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2009.
Jake and Dinos Chapman unmask the contemporary hypocrisy of history, of war, of religion and of Eros. It is almost as if everything ends up in the apocalyptic grinder of the two artists. Their works are meticulous in execution. Very detailed, some of them stage explicit references to mass murders of 20th century history. Their artistic discourse deals with the concept of human against human. Their irony is often shocking and is used to alleviate the weight of tragedy by making it grotesque.
Jake and Dinos Chapman are able to cite diverging moments of history. They mix the opulence of the Baroque with the essence of primitive societies and with traces of consumerism. A reference point to them is the series of etchings, Disasters of War (1810-1820), by Francisco Goya on which they have added personal touches.
The Museum purchased the Chapman brothers’ work My uncle went to see hell and all I got was this lousy souvenir, a small sculpture depicting grotesque scenes inspired by the Holocaust, part of the more famous installation Fucking Hell.