ARTIST JAKE CHAPMAN: ‘MOVING TO THE COTSWOLDS? IF ANYTHING IT SHARPENED MY PESSIMISM’
Together with his brother, Dinos, Chapman made a name for himself as a ‘bad boy’ of the art world in the Nineties. Now 55, he’s back with a satirical novel that skewers the world of wellness
“Wellness is just another extreme unattainable form of being,” says the artist Jake Chapman, whose latest work, a novel called 2+2=5, is a rewriting of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In it, Chapman imagines a society stupefied by wellness, leisure and enforced cheerfulness. A utopian nightmare, if you will.
Chapman wrote the book long before the pandemic, but it took three years to get the nod from the Orwell Estate. Nonetheless it captures the zeitgeist. The Rogue Room, for instance, is a movement vocally rejecting the spiritual narcissists that can be found on the yoga scene, while David Hockney recently declared that he was “bored” with “bossy” and “ridiculous” wellness. The icing on the gluten-free cake is that Chapman is working on
Iakovos “Jake” Chapman (born 1966) and Konstantinos “Dinos” Chapman (born 1962 Father English their mother from Larnaca.) are British visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers. Their subject matter tries to be deliberately shocking, including, in 2008, a series of works that appropriated original watercolours by Adolf Hitler.
In the mid-1990s, their sculptures were included in the YBA showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. In 2003, the two were nominated for the annual Turner Prize but lost out to Grayson Perry. In 2013, their painting One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved III was the subject of Derren Brown’s Channel 4 special, The Great Art Robbery.
