JAKE CHAPMAN

NICESIS: The Unwellness of Wellbeing

30 July – 28 August, 2026_Edinburgh Festival Fringe Venue 560

Jake Chapman has spent more than thirty years sticking his fingers into the soft bits of Western culture: taste, morality, consumerism, war, the art market and our misplaced faith that civilisation is basically still trying its best.

Working first with his brother Dinos, and now on his own – he has made an art of exquisite bad behaviour: mutant bodies, toy-soldier hellscapes, ‘rectified’ Goya’s, collaborations with Hitler, and in bookland, writing which pushes all kinds of boundaries.

Either way, the horror is real. But so is the comedy (Chapman is clever enough to know that the two have shared a bed for centuries). In Nicesis: The Unwellness of Wellbeing, the therapeutic language of self-care is fed through a badly maintained industrial mincer. Bucolic paintings sprout bodily interruptions. Flesh becomes scorched terrain. Lowry urbanscapes have no people; neither factory-owners nor their working-class. All gone.

At the centre of it all sits a suicide-bomber vest cast in bronze: obscene, seductive and ludicrously permanent, a bit of home-made kit designed to obliterate the soft flesh of the body turned into something that could outlive us all.

This is a small show with a big pulse, aimed squarely at a culture selling calm, purity, and personal optimisation while the wider world continues towards hell.

Deep breath in. Hold it.

Namaste.