MONTREAL.- DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art presents Come and See, the first major exhibition in North America by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. In collaboration since the 1990s, the Chapmans’ varied and multidisciplinary practice grapples with a wide range of themes including morality, religion, sex, death, philosophy, the history of art, and consumer culture. While provocative and deliberately confrontational, their work is also deeply critical, challenging us to acknowledge what is uncomfortable and messy through irreverence and dark humour.

This large-scale exhibition, displayed in DHC/ART’s two locations, presents a wide survey of the Chapmans’ oeuvre: sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, film, literature, and installation offer a riotous immersion into the horror and hilarity that inhabits their world. On view is Disasters of War IV (2001), one of the artists’ earliest print portfolios, which references Francisco Goya’s famous and critical depiction of war and its atrocities resulting from Napoleon’s occupation of Spain. The Sum of All Evil (2012-13) is the latest monumental iteration of the well-known Hell series of vitrine dioramas, and features apocalyptic landscapes teeming with miniature figures of Nazi soldiers and McDonald’s characters in the throes of grotesque cruelty. The overwhelming scale of these scenes is outdone only by the incredible detail and painstaking labour evident here and in other works by the Chapmans. The Chapman Family Collection (2002) parodies traditional museum displays and ethnographic museal practices. This selection of bronze sculptures merges the fetishization of ethnographic objects with McDonald’s characters—symbols of the commercial world—in order to reveal the underlying hypocrisy of globalization, colonialism, and commercialization.

Named after Elem Klimov’s 1985 film, Come and See provides an opportunity to behold an impressive array of works by these prolific artists. Above all, however, it is an invitation to keep our eyes open, to bear witness, to question and, perhaps, even to delight.

Jake (b. 1966, Cheltenham) and Dinos (b. 1962, London) Chapman were nominated for The Turner Prize in 2003. They have exhibited their work extensively since the 1990s, including recent solo exhibitions at SongEun ArtSpace Museum, Seoul, and PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (both 2013); The Hermitage, St Petersburg (2012); and Tate Liverpool (2006).