Jake & Dinos Chapman at Cass Sculpture Foundation

The Chapman brothers graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 1990 and have worked collaboratively ever since. Their notoriety’s definitive moment came shortly after this when their sculptural work was presented as part of the iconic Young British Artists shows Brilliant! and Sensation. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003, the pair were rapidly capturing the imagination of the art world’s commentators when their seminal work, Hell, was destroyed (in a stroke of unadulterated irony) by a large scale fire at a Saatchi art storage warehouse. Other artists said to have lost work in the inferno include Turner Prize winners Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. Tracey Emin’s infamous Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 also fell victim to the flames. Despite the enormity of the loss, the Chapman brothers have since laughed off the incident and Dinos even wrote, for The Guardian , “I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was a prototype: we were deliberately not expert, so it was clumsy and inaccurate.”

In what has been considered a retort to the unparalleled destruction of immensely valuable artwork, and the complex production of Hell, the childlike fabrication of the miniature sculptures that populate Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good involves only the most primitive of artistic materials.

Meanwhile, The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, but not the Mineral Rights (a name derived from a J. Paul Getty quote) demonstrates Jake and Dinos’ ability to take something with infantile appeal, such as the familiar silhouettes of dinosaurs often seen in child’s play, and turn them into menacing eight metre tall motifs reflecting the darkness their work so often explores.

You can see both exhibits at Cass Sculpture Foundation from 14 April for free with general entry. And the bit we really love? You can build your own miniature cardboard versions of the three large outdoor sculptures when you buy the The Good, The Bad, The Ugly kit from the Jake & Dinos Chapman online shop, or from Cass.