Andrew Moncrief: Between Tradition and Transformation

Throughout art history, the male gaze in depictions of the female body is undeniably pervasive. Andrew Moncrief has made an artistic practice out of turning the tables. Questioning narrow views on masculinity, he had to incorporate by growing up in a small Canadian town in the Nineties runs like a red thread through his body of work. He fragments and zooms in on contemporary and old-school images of apparent steel bodies, brimming with masculine clichés and ideals of stoicism and strength. A practice rather common on the female body but less so the other way around. The Berlin-based artist transfers this perspective of otherness onto his own gender by dissecting male representations in search of what could be lacking. He examines them for hollowness.

The bodies in Moncrief’s paintings disintegrate into barely recognisable parts. Dynamics such as dominance and submissiveness are challenged and reversed. The hybrid figures become abstract, they interrupt the smooth and superficial body images we consume on a daily basis. They create the waning yet much needed negative space, that gives us all a break form omnipresent hyper-visibility and culture of complaisance.

Through a different lens of proximity he creates distance, in which we can breathe and roam. It’s only in this space that authenticity, seduction, self-exploration and potential self-acceptance become possible. Last but not least, it is a loving perspective of genuine interest and patience, already in itself the content of Moncrief’s images.

SLEEK: Your work explores the depiction of masculinity, can you tell us a bit about your personal journey around this topic and how creating art has helped you carve a personal space to challenge the norms?

AM: I would have to say a lot of my struggles around masculinity revolve around growing up in a small town, in a working-class family in a time in the late 90s and teens in the early 2000s, being a closeted gay kid who wasn’t able to accept himself. When I think back to my teen’s living on Vancouver Island, it was hard because I had no queer male role models at the time. The only depictions of gay people at the time were these campy characters on television — like Will & Grace — that were mostly just bad gay punchlines.

So, I think growing up I had to mask (pun intended) parts of myself as a survival technique. As an adult, I’ve discovered the clarity of hindsight to really look back and understand myself, I am able to try and challenge those parts of me that I always kept concealed, to shine light in the dark and also try and laugh about it. We have such a narrow view about what masculinity is; it’s ridiculous. It can mean so many things and yet it means so little. A lot of my work has subsequently been focused on themes of queer identity, vis-à-vis masculinity, body image and portraiture, implicating myself in some way in paintings, drawings and photographs.

S: Can you elaborate on your technique and the rather intimate process of photography your paintings precede?

AM: Generally, I always begin with photographic images as a jumping off point, sourcing images from all over the place: Instagram, google searches, museum archives and more recently text-to-image AI. I am a bit like a scavenger when it comes to my work and its references; collecting images from contemporary culture as well as art history.

I think our addictions to social media say a lot about who we are, and the images we consume really paint a picture of our inner worlds. I constantly and often problematically find myself scrolling through endless images of skin and bodies perpetuated by algorithms feeding more and more of what I “like” into the stream of images. In an attempt to be more aware of how I consume images and, as such, try to integrate that into my work. I have begun to take these images, transfigure in photoshop, create collages and then project onto the canvas to create my compositions.  I then work with an airbrush — a technique which lends itself well to photography — to create an underpainting for the image. There are no brushstrokes, it’s almost like working with pixels, However, processing it more like an old master painting; imprimatura, grisaille and colour glazing.

S: You grew up on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and have lived in Montreal and Vancouver. What made you come to Berlin, and how has the city shaped your art so far?

AM: I moved to Berlin in 2019, shortly before the pandemic. At the time, I had been living for about a decade in Montreal where I went to university, and spent most of my twenties. In 2018, I applied for a Grant to go to Vancouver to do a residency. After I was finished with my residency, I decided that I didn’t want to return to Montreal, but instead take a leap of faith and move to Berlin. Making the move to Berlin shortly before the global pandemic was a strange experience, however, luckily enough I managed to find a studio space the week everything closed down, so I was able to hide away in my studio and work a lot.

I believe the best thing about living in Berlin, and Europe in general, is the exposure you have to art, museums, and galleries. All things that feed the well of inspiration for artists. I visit museums a lot in Berlin, it’s such a privilege to be able to think of an artwork and then go visit it in person the same day. That has had a huge influence on my work, I look at a lot of classical painting and also get to see countless contemporary works via gallery and museum openings.

S: You made a series inspired by erotic pictures from the archive of Schwules Museum, Berlin. What interested you in the themes of eroticism and porn? How would you define the fine line between both?

AM: A couple of years ago, very much by chance, I took a tour of the Archives at the Schwules Museum with my dear friend and fellow artist Peter Welz to see an exhibition called “Intimacy” exploring the idea of public vs. private. It was fantastic. They have an extensive archive of men’s pornographic magazines for the last 50 years or so. I was really blown away by the collection because it was like the ultimate library of contemporary nudes, an anthropological cross-section of queer male body and masculinity of the recent century.
I began using these images to make collages to turn into paintings, though I was less interested in their pornographic qualities as I was in their eroticism. I wanted to use the fetishised body parts to create a sort of hybrid figure that represents a more contemporary idea of body dysmorphia yet somehow still had this seduction embedded in it. There is less intrigue when you’re given an image as a whole. I think you always need to be left wanting more.

S: In the age of social media, everything seems hyper-visible, almost like in pornography, what role does social media and the beauty standards perpetuated by it play in your work?

AM: I am most interested in how social media — literally — shapes our bodies. I am interested in the algorithmic feedback loop that social media platforms capitalise from, and how the steady feed of increasingly eroticised images we consume daily are altering both our psychology and physical body. Symptoms of body dysmorphia are amplified by social media, and while it is very common to discuss these issues regarding women, it is spoken about much less among men.

This is due, impart, to the ostensibly “virtuous” nature of sports like bodybuilding and the appropriation of ultra-capitalist language that surrounds gym bro culture’s values of hyper-individualism, competition and “self-improvement”. All of these things feed into male body image culture, increasing anxiety around a pressure to conform to these ever restricting ideals.

S: The bodies you create are in perpetual metamorphosis, is that a healing state for you?

AM: I like to think of the figures constructing themselves in the painting, as if they are some type of masculine building blocks that assemble themselves. I like thinking about the term bodybuilding in a literal sense; body, building. What does that mean exactly; building a body? And what does that look like? How do these bodies build themselves? I don’t really see my work as healing or cathartic, I see it more as a way of expressing my present psychological states. I cannot say that in ten years from now I will be making the same work. Likewise, I believe that the interest is in the struggle itself to try and express something intangible — being the emotions around my subjective

S: Does femininity as some sort of counterpart play any role in your work?

AM: I feel like most often, masculinity is defined by what it isn’t and that’s always related to the feminine. Emotional awareness, vulnerability, sensitivity are all things that, I believe, are misperceived as “feminine” and therefore “weak”. In reality, they are in fact strengths – strengths for which I try to embody not only in my work but in my personal life. While I don’t necessarily often work with images of the female body, I have a desire to really question in my work the mislabeling of these characteristics as “feminine” and more as strengths.

S: Your work explores the connection between queer identity and body dysmorphia. Can you speak to why you think these themes are so interconnected?

AM: Often, I feel as queer people we struggle with the pressures to conform to heteronormative standards to fit in, with a heightened sense of self-consciousness that often leads to dissatisfaction with our physical appearance. In my case, I always struggled to grow up because I never really fit the masculine norms I was surrounded with growing up in a small town, surrounded by a masculine ideology that was primarily focused on construction worker bro’s and manual labor which is inextricably bound to competitive macho behavioural notions of stoicism, being strong, macho and working hard; something I never really felt I fit in to despite my best attempts.