Jake & Dinos Chapman, One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved IX, 2008, oil on canvas, 54 × 43 cm (21 1/4 × 16 15/16 in). Photo: Stephen White.

Angus Fairhurst’s dead, Tracy Emin choses RA to AA and I’m not feeling well lately, but for the Chapman bros. The YBA enfants terribles are back, alive and kicking, with their sardonic, irreverent, strange ways of looking at things.

Entering the secret alleyway of Mason’s Yard, hell is about to be unleashed. Fucking Hell actually, as this is the title of their magnificent, infamous work. It is a new, altered version of the original Hell, which, ironically, was burned down during the 2004 fire, and it looks more ferocious, bloodier and more grotesque than ever before.

Moving around the massive, glass-shielded Chapmanesque universe, we come across all the possible ways somebody could encounter violent death, and even some that are yet to be discovered. The symbolic reading of the disasters of war is only too obvious and works at a primary level. Yes, war is a very bad thing where a lot of beheading, poling, and skinning is on the daily menu, and we, the viewers, are all a bunch of sick voyeuristic individuals who enjoy watching and examining every anomaly behind the safety of the glass. Horrific and humourous, sepulchral and artificial, it is rather impressive how the Chapmans in their installations manipulate representation, wholesomely, with unabashed craftsmanship and skill that defies any conceptual purism.

They did it before with their travesty of the ‘rare ethnographic’ Chapman Family Collection of primitive Big Mac relics, as well as with their sacrilegious defacing treatment of Goya’s darkest and most adored drawings, and they do it again now. The Chapmans enjoy indulging themselves in manipulating popular iconic cultural images that have been reduced to aesthetic objects according to Marxist commodity fetishism, so as to re-create a bit of good old havoc, often employing an offensive, kitsch or plainly joking manner in their pursuit. In that sense they are not much different from what Warhol had done, or even with Duchamp and his ready-mades, only they carry a penchant for crassly exposing the subtle nuances between the exotic and the banal, in issues relating to contemporary history, corporate morality and anti-social attitudes. The act of working over famous artworks of the past refers to the grave postmodernist occupation of appropriating, deconstructing and reworking over the preoccupation of the birth/return of the new.

Hell’s diorama consists of nine glass vitrines that form the shape of the swastika. Inside, more than 30,000 tiny mutant soldiers, some of them in Nazi attire, engage in mutual atrocities in a bleak, burned-down landscape. Where the work actually takes off is in details such as the image of the Führer sitting on the side of a massacre scene painting picturesque landscapes. You can’t help thinking that a great amount of Chapmans’ little helpers were employed to do most of the dirty job, however the sheer force of this apocalyptic underworld leaves the viewers breathless, and asking for more ‘degenerate art’ in the making. Don't expect a moral at the end of this sensational gruesome fairytale; the beauty is the beast, as much as a cornucopia of nightmarish dreams fed Bosch’s imagination centuries ago.

Continuing along the lines of appropriation, and using the evils of Nazism as a prevalent theme, the duo of Greek-Cypriot descent include a series of watercolours in the show named If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be. It actually includes 13 original watercolours by Adolph Hitler the Chapmans bought for £115,000 and decorated with ’70s psychedelic motifs, such as rainbows, love hearts, stars and butterflies. The blatant naïveté of the reworked surfaces not only shows that Hitler’s personality as we know it is nowhere to be seen and that the big bad wolf was a little bad painter really — a negative assessment which cost the life of his non-Jewish art school prof during Kristallnacht — but mainly deals with issues concerning the nature of artistic value. How do fame and history brush upon art? Do conventional moral values play a part in an artist’s apotheosis or doom? Is the artist a product of his time? And is it right to intervene with art, even if it is made by the most loathed person in history?

The last part of the show consists of 19th-century portraits of the Victorian bourgeoisie entitled One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved. The original painters here are unknown but the artistic strategy is similar; the Chapmans work over the faces with minute detail, creating a delightful freak show of horrific cuts, burns, and ghoulish deformities, a beautiful dark Gothic tale of horrors, ‘annihilating’ the grandeur of stately portraiture, leaving nothing intact in their way.