The Tate denied that it had set out to shock visitors by shortlisting the Chapman brothers’ painted bronze of two lifesize inflatable dolls among works of art competing for the £20,000 prize.

The shortlisted works go on display at Tate Britain in London today with a warning: “Some of the works in this exhibition are sexually explicit and not recommended for children under 16.”

Another contender for the prize, Grayson Perry, a transvestite potter, has scratched sex acts, including paedophilia, and obscene language on to the surfaces of ceramic vases.

Katharine Stout, the exhibition’s co-curator, said that there was no intention to shock, although the annual prize thrives on controversy, with Martin Creed’s flickering light and Chris Ofili’s elephant dung among former winners in its 20-year history.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, best known for mannequins of pubescent girls sprouting male genitalia, have come up with the title Death for their sex-dolls. It accompanies Sex, which features butchered bodies swarming with maggots, spiders and flies — joke-shop props and medical skeletons cast in bronze — in an update of Great Deeds Against the Dead, created nine years ago and depicting mutilated bodies hanging from a tree. Ladbrokes installed the brothers as 6/4 favourites to win the prize on December 7.

Perry deals with issues such as child abuse in his ceramic works, taking an ancient art form but glazing uncomfortable images and messages on to his pots. They include A Tradition of Bitterness, which shows two suburban homes alongside the silhouetted figure of a man who has hanged himself and another with an erection being beaten by a woman.

Lines of text on a vase depicting images of young girls include: “F*** off you middle-class tourist.”

Perry often wears doll-like party outfits when he dresses as his alter-ego, Claire. One of his elaborately embroidered garments, titled Coming Out Dress, is featured in the show.

The other shortlisted artists are Willie Doherty, who is showing his video work Re-Run, a looped sequence of a man running across the Craigavon Bridge in Londonderry. He is depicted running across a bridge from two angles on facing screens in what the Tate hailed as “representing the human condition”.

Anya Gallacio has created a number of exhibits which will rot during the exhibition, which lasts until January 18.

She has arranged fresh apples over a bronze cast of a tree in Because Nothing Has Changed. They will start to smell as they rot and ferment during the show. Gallacio has also displayed 1,600 gerbera flowers behind Perspex screens. Ben Tufnell, another co-curator, dismissed the suggestion that it was glorified flower-arranging.

He said: “It’s completely different. She has taken flowers and arranged them, but it is a very painterly thing we’re looking at.” Tate staff drew parallels between the shortlisted artists and the greatest masters. Perry is likened to the 18th-century satirists Hogarth and Rowlandson, the Chapmans to Goya’s powerful portrayals of man’s inhumanity to man, Gallaccio to 17th-century still lifes, and Doherty to 18th-century masters of social commentary.

Mr Tufnell said: “These artists are dealing with big ideas. Life and death and contentious issues in contemporary society.”

He said of the Chapmans: “I find them comic and absurd. It’s art. Art can be anything that does provoke a reaction.”

The jury that selected the works included Andrew Wilson of Art Monthly, Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Frank Cohen, representing the Patrons of New Art and Chrissie Iles, a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art. They were chaired by Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate.

But David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw, the satirical art magazine, dismissed the sex-doll piece as gratuitous smut, Gallaccio’s apples as crass and Doherty’s video as threadbare. Perry’s vases? “I can’t be bothered to look at them.”

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