Presented at White Cube the exhibition Works from the Chapman Family Collection comprised an extraordinary assemblage of rare ethnographic and reliquary fetish objects that subsequent generations of the Chapman family have diligently added to over a period of seventy years. With the exception of a very few isolated works generously exhibited in Africa: The Art of a Continent at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the collection has never before been displayed in its shameless entirety. 

Highlights of the Chapman Family Collection include virtually unknown primitive trophies and initiation masks from the former colonial regions of Camgib, Seirf and Ekoc, and as such are recognised by accredited experts as being the most noteworthy in the whole wide world. In terms of the genealogy of our own contemporary culture, the Chapman Family Collection traces the latent influences impressing upon it - those mute voices found simmering in the ritualistic embers of a primordial dawn. In its monolithic stoicism it reverberates with the history of a culture pillaged by industrial colonialism. However, its beauty remains both intact and contagious. In fact, ever since twentieth-century colonialism began to rake virgin soil for essential minerals and discovered in the objects of primitive art a seam of rich and untouched treasures, its own lineage was irrevocably altered by the unwitting destructive interruption of paradise. 

The Chapman Family Collection shows how fruitful economic endeavour ignited the artistic passions of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, whose interest in ethnographic art began to dissipate the long shadow cast over it by Western culture. Through the visionary sight of these untimely artists ethnographic art was both reconciled and fused with Modernism, creating timeless forms and enabling Global culture to harmonise in a singular poetic language.