Board and Box: Ebony and rosewood with inlaid skull and crossbones veneer

British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman (Jake born 1966; Dinos born 1962) started working together in the early 1990s and have become one of the leading art partnerships in the contemporary British art world. Their first body of work was based on a variety of sculptural interpretations of Goya’s The Disasters of War, which they fashioned from toy soldiers and mutated mannequin parts. In 2000 they produced Hell, a giant 1:32 scale reinterpretation of mass genocide and later completed a series of works that combine faux African sculpture with McDonald’s inspired iconography. The Brothers have also exhibited an original edition of Goya’s The Disasters of War, over-painted by the artists with clown heads. For their RS&A chess set commission, the Chapman Brothers chose to create a game played by postapocalyptic adolescents, the one side white with Arian haircuts and the other side black with Afro hair. The set is displayed in its own handcrafted games box, the board inlaid with white and black double-headed skull and crossbones.