They began exhibiting singly in 1992, and together the following year, with a work, The Disasters of War, which was a version of Goya’s gruesome series of etchings of that title in the form of painstakingly carved plastic soldiers They live and work in London’s East End The rest is silence. “People always ask about our parents, our backgrounds,” says Jake, “but we’re wary of the biography being the redemptive angle for the work – the idea that, if you get nothing from the work, you go back to the oedipal relations with the parent, and so on.”They are both rather tall and, nearing the end of this epic project, stubbly and tired-looking. They appear to have been raised in Cheltenham; both did first degrees at art colleges (Dinos at Ravensbourne and Jake at North London Poly), then came together at the Royal College of Art in 1988, where they both got MAs. But shock tactics can backfire, too.This is what has happened with the brothers Chapman. Writers in two Sunday papers have called them “fascist” (apparently in the sense of “very unpleasant”), a third remarked that “these boys make Damien Hirst look like the Angel Gabriel”.

Various other journalists have reeled away from encounters with them, complaining about rudeness, puerility, refusals to answer questions and being dumped on from a great height by mounds of pseudo- post- deconstructionist gibberish.It’s true that the Chapmans are stingy and sometimes plain misleading with information about themselves. Shock is much the most important weapon in the modern artist’s armoury, the one thing that, like technical virtuosity a century ago, can guarantee attention. Here and there raw red wounds have been opened in the silver skin, and the “blood” is pouring out of them. The man is modelled on a photograph from the last days of Imperial China of a prisoner dying the “death of a thousand cuts”.

(The photograph is reproduced in a book by George Bataille, The Tears of Eros.) From the bucket, the “blood” is pumped back up to the ceiling to resume its journey through the figure’s body.Jake and Dinos Chapman have found fame using the same means employed by almost every successful artist since Francis Bacon: shock effect. “It seems relatively mild in opposition to the more pathologically obvious stuff – yet it seems to me more pathological that they have no genitals.”There is a persistent sound of dripping in this room. But it’s only when we step into the room that we see the crowning horror of “Chapmanworld”.A beautiful silver-fibreglass figure of a man is suspended upside-down from the ceiling. Coming round the tree, we see in the next room blood-like stuff dripping into a bucket, the drips amplified through loudspeakers. “Presentiments of things to come, perhaps,” he says with a sinister smile.They are all naked, and they have no genitals.

Nothing odd here: when was the last time you saw a shop-window mannequin with fully formed genitals? “It’s really quite nice that our work has achieved the position whereby we can show a series of mannequins without any genitalia,” says Jake. Already the components of the tableau are beginning to come together here. On the trunk and branches of a miniature tree, sprouting with green leaves, a gaggle of small child-mannequins disport themselves. There is nothing wrong with them except (as Dinos points out) that the small child with the Afro wig has a small cut on his knee.