Artistic gags with Yuri and Konstantin Shamanov

It's a spoof which, at first, evokes a long lost tribe of Russian constructivists emerging from the heart of Africa. Posing as Yuri and Konstantin Shamanov, the Chapman brothers have nailed geometric assemblages of intersecting pieces of driftwood on top of cheap-ish African tribal figures to create five new sculptures.

It’s not as subtle as the fusion of African art and McDonald’s burgers, chip packets and imagery in the Chapmans Family Collection, now on show at Tate Britain, but it opens a new Russian door in the brothers’ oeuvre of appropriations and deformations, which is probably the objective.

There’s an entertaining set of wall drawings, with plenty more artistic gags. A watercolour design for a primitivist-minimalist monument is dominated by a giant hand (perhaps one day to be made from welded steel, many times human height, like an enormous Alexander Calder). Some constructivist bees and trees have been quickly sketched onto mass-produced Russian writing paper which has flowers printed on it. There is an agitprop sauna, in which naughty things are happening (apparently the Russian avant-garde really did imagine using saunas to spread the message of communism in the Twenties). As usual with the Chapmans the gags are multi-layered.

The press release tells us that the Shamanovs served in the Soviet army and variously worked in the theatre and "business" before "they founded the Chameleon art movement in 2003 with the aim of transforming the Moscow Art Scene from within". This, then, is a parody about the emergence of the Russian contemporary art scene and the strategies for success pursued by artists within it.

Yuri and Konstantin Shamanov
Orel Art
7 Howick Place
SW1P 1BB