Jake Chapman



A lot of people seem to think Hell is about the Holocaust – but it’s the absolute inverse of that. It’s the Nazis who are being subjected to industrial genocide. Which means people aren’t actually looking at it.



The idea came from chaos, the mess of our conversations, though we never really had anything to say. It’s the same idea over and over, regurgitated. We bought 60,000 toy soldiers, chopped them up, remodelled and recast them. Toy soldiers were the most inappropriate form we could think of, because they exist within the realm of play. Also, they rob death of its magnitude. We put the soldiers in nine vitrines then arranged them to form a swastika – that one was Hitler’s idea! Putting something behind glass escalates the level of voyeurism: you become implicated, just by the act of looking.

Hell is riddled with detail, but no one bit is more significant than any other: it’s equally horrific. Every act is occurring at the same second. It’s a snapshot, one mass moment of nastiness. The process of making it was the whole point: even if you create something out of 60,000 Nazi figures, it’s still nowhere near the actual thing it’s referring to. Two years of work making 60,000 little soldiers – and the Nazis were able to murder 60,000 Russian PoWs in six hours.

It's not about the Holocaust. It’s the Nazis who are being subjected to industrial genocide Jake Chapman

The fact that it’s been seen as somehow sympathetic to Nazis because there’s so many of them is ridiculous. The Nazis are being put into their own systematic genocide. It’s not called Holocaust, it’s called Hell. The Nazis practised genocide on everyone they thought was inferior. What we’ve done is to mirror that: the Nazis are being recycled within their own mechanism by skeletons, mutants and aliens. Nazis killing Jews is the historical truth. Nazis getting the shit kicked out of them is so science-fictionally wrong that there might as well be Martians in there.

It was hard work. I liked going home every day and picking the superglue off my fingers. After all the time it took, I had no affection for it whatsoever – and then it fucking burnt. We heard the Momart warehouse was on fire and drove up to have a giggle because we thought it was full of other YBA art. Then we got a call saying Hell was in there. We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn. A smart-assed journo phoned up and said: “Is it true that Hell is on fire?” It was fantastic – like a work of art still in the process of being made, even as it burnt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s not really finished. Hell can never be finished.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe

Dinos Chapman



Jake and I decided beforehand that we were going to make a monstrous failure. It was intentionally unmagnificent and unrewarding. We used the most pathetic way of representing the thing that has most exorcised western civilisation. We had a few assistants, but Jake and I did the donkey work.

I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was clumsy and inaccurate Dinos Chapman

We would’ve been in the studio for those two years anyway, though. It just so happened that everything we did ended up as one sculpture. We could just as easily have made a perfectly round ball of marble. It wouldn’t have made any difference. There were no breakthrough moments, everything happened slowly. There was no artistic gesture involved, no Pollock-esque flailing about. It was all just laborious, thankless and fairly miserable.

We knew it was finished when the lorries turned up with crates to take it to Apocalypse at the Royal Academy, where it was first shown. But it’s not really finished – Hell can never be finished. The moment you’ve done something really horrible to a poor plastic soldier, you can always think of something much worse. Jake and I could easily have been installed at the show carrying on. I don’t think that would have been very interesting for anybody, to sit and watch us make it. It would probably draw crowds now, for the wrong reasons.

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. As our eyesight fails, our accomplishments have improved. But that just means we’ve got better at something we never wanted to do, something we despise doing. I hate working.