The brothers’ 2001 work, The Disasters of War IV, is being shown alongside pieces from the museum’s collection, which include the original sketch for the Charge of the Mamelukes. The individual works draw on a range of sources, one of the carvings, for instance, mimics Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938), but here it is topped by a red-haired mask of Ronald McDonald. This can be interpreted as a comment on Modernism's appropriation of so-called "primitive'" art. As with all the Chapmans's works, it is full of contradictions and the installation can be interpreted in a number of ways - for example it can be read as a critique of the display of ethnographic items as aesthetic objects rather than pieces imbued with social and historical meaning. In a wider sense it can also be seen as a criticism of colonialism and globalization, although this could be an over-simplification as the brothers have declared that the world is "a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated".

curatorluc tuymans next to caravaggio’s ‘david with the head of goliath’, post 1606, at fondazione prada, milan Significant exhibitions of their work include the Young British Artists (YBA) showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. They were nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 2003 but lost out to Grayson Perry.I think that works pretty well," says Chapman. (Dinos did not want to be interviewed, and, it later turns out, is busy colouring in the final artwork for this week's opening of their Whitechapel Gallery show.) Aren't these images too disturbing for children? "Nope: there's nothing we've done here that can rival the darkness of the imaginations of children. They aren't the innocents that adults want them to be." Aside from a shared art practice, each brother also has an extracurricular activity. Jake is, apparently, an enthusiastic writer of philosophical and critical texts; Dinos, meanwhile, is an unexpectedly accomplished recording artist. Last year saw his debut, Luftbobler, released on the Vinyl Factory label. A kind of techno album, Throbbing Gristle, Autechre and Aphex were all audible, luftbobbling around. It’s disarmingly good. The Chapmans have recently found it remarkably difficult to offend people. While their early works - the lifesize girl mannequins with penises for noses - were routinely dismissed as emblematically egregious grotesqueries of 90s British art, in the past few years they have received massive acclaim, in language they profess to find baffling and hilarious. They made Hell, a tableau in which thousands of toy second world war German soldiers mutilate and kill each other and themselves in a psychotic Nazi orgy, and had it interpreted as a profound comment on the Holocaust and its representations: "The idea of making 5,000 little toy soldiers all running round mutilating each other, and then find pathos in that - it's alarming that people are prepared to cathartically reappropriate these things which are so redundant and void," says Jake. "It took us three years to make 5,000 people. It took the Germans three hours to kill 15,000 Russian prisoners of war." This work is an assemblage of eighty-three small mixed media sculptures composed of bought, reformed and modelled elements. The sculpture is made of a variety of materials, mostly plastics. This question goes to the heart of their art, and explains a lot about those cuddly images of children and cutesy animals. The adult insistence that children are innocents corrupted by civilisation is a presumption the brothers want to subvert. "It's a will to believe, as Nietzsche would have put it. You can see it in Picasso, where he has this idea of getting rid of nasty adult instincts and seeing like a child. We don't believe in the idea of innocence, in the same way we don't believe in beauty in art. Celine [the French writer] said beauty is for poodles. He was right."

So we've gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings," continues Dinos, "and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads." The Chapmans' series is from a - historically very significant - edition published directly from Goya's plates in 1937, as a protest against fascist atrocities in the Spanish civil war; its frontispiece is a photograph of bomb damage to the Goya Foundation. Given how important the Disasters of War were to Picasso, Dali and the image of the civil war, this is clearly an important, evocative, emotionally raw thing, and they have scribbled all over it.The new works are not in the studio when we talk about them. I feel I have a pretty good idea of the Chapmans' approach to Goya, so I don't worry too much about this. We talk about criticism and the way it resorts, always, to the humanist rhetoric of moral, emotional and political meaning. We laugh at the pious things the art critic of the Sunday Times said about them.

The Chapman Family Collection is one of a number of works by the artists that make reference to McDonalds; others include The Rape of Creativity 1999 (private collection), Rhizome 2000 (private collection) and Arbeit McFries 2001 (Tate L03203). Of course, the Chapman Brothers didn't intend anything like that. Ready, as ever, with a dense rationalisation, Jake riposted: "Our intention was not in any way to trivialise the Holocaust." Rather, you see, it was a comment on the innate inadequacy of artistic responses to such genocide. "This is an event that's beyond representation. Using toy soldiers is a way of emphasising the impossibility of that. Here are these little figures that are totally incompatible with the pathos they're supposed to support." Their large Hell landscapes, such as Hell (2000) and The Sum of All Evil (2012-13), are at once monumental in scale and minutely detailed. These apocalyptic landscapes, teeming with miniature figures, depict scenes of excessive brutality involving Nazi soldiers and, in more recent works, McDonald’s characters. The grotesque and often surreal violence of the scenes is offset by the overwhelming detail and painstaking labour evident in these and many of the Chapmans’s works. Children who visit the gallery will get some protection from the Chapmans' more grotesque imaginings. "We're scatter-hanging the gallery," explains curator Selina Levinson, "so we can put the most upsetting images higher up." How does Jake feel about this cunning if sanitising hang? "In this case we have been relaxed about it. We have to be respectful of [the gallery's] thoughts about what the public and the trustees will find acceptable." It’s] a way of gouging out something that has kind of been censored by a complacent notion of a moral reading.

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 Many of their shows offer titles that are as provocative as the artworks themselves, such as The Blind Leading The Blind (Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague), In the Realm of the Senseless (Artur, Istanbul, Turkey), To Live and Think Like Pigs (UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, USA) or SHITROSPECTIVE (Contemporary Fine Arts Galerie, Berlin). Many of the works created by the Chapman Brothers’ are installations, or three dimensional environments with multiple facets and nuances. In light of this, we’re sharing a number of videos of their exhibitions, to offer a more complete sense of their art and aesthetic. Our next Artists You Need To Know are Jake and Dinos Chapman who are known as the Chapman Brothers. The brothers will also be running drawing and poetry workshops. "Another idea we had is a colouring competition, where the winner would have me and Dinos come round and read them a bedtime story." What would they read? Quite possibly something from their soon-to-be published collection of reworked fairytales, entitled Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights. It's a book that begins: