7. Jake & Dinos Chapman – Great Deeds Against The Dead 1994
The dastardly art duo were especially haunted by the famous series of etchings known as The Disasters of War, in which Goya portrayed the atrocities he had witnessed in the Peninsular War between Spain and France with a visceral horror, that was deemed too horrific to be shown in Goya’s lifetime. In 1993 the brothers re-created The Disasters of War as a series of miniature tableaux. They melted down toy soldiers, twisting, maiming and painting them to resemble Lilliputian versions of Goya’s prints. Great Deeds Against the Dead, one of the works from The Disasters of War, was the artists life-sized contribution to the legendary Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, and depicts three naked male bodies bound to a tree; blood dribbles from the crotches of these shop dummies where their genitalia would have been, if they’d ever had them. One victim’s arm dangles by its fingers from the makeshift gallows alongside the carcass of his torso, the severed head skewered on a branch.