‘We had a seething disdain for each other’: Jake Chapman on splitting from brother Dinos

One of the most enduring partnerships of the YBA movement is over. Yet their gleefully nasty, provocative aesthetic lives on in the first solo show by the ‘Colonel Kurtz of the Cotswolds’

Jake Chapman’s new exhibition is called Me, Myself and Eye so I shouldn’t have been surprised that he, himself, him was there at the door. This pop-up show is, he says, just a small taster of a huge quantity of work he’s made recently. And it’s appetising, if like me you enjoy the grotesque, comical, outrageous art he’s been making since the 1990s with his brother Dinos. But why me, myself and no Dinos? The answer is so unexpected I have to change my plan to simply review his show and start recording his utterances.

I assumed this was just a side project from the career of Jake and Dinos Chapman, an artistic partnership that seemed as close and enduring as that of Gilbert and George and Jane and Louise Wilson. But no. It turns out this is the end. The split. The brothers who made their names playing the twisted court jesters of the Young British Artist generation have fallen out and broken up.

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