ANDREW MONCRIEF
Andrew Moncrief, a Canadian painter who lives and works in Berlin, Germany, can be understood as a movement away from control toward instability, where the painted body shifts from a site of likeness into something far less fixed. His earlier work, grounded in attentive realism and intimate figuration, centred on the charged presence of the male form. But over time, that commitment to precision gave way to a more open, searching approach - one less concerned with how bodies appear and more invested in how they feel, dissolve, and reconfigure. In this transition, painting becomes a space not of depiction, but of transformation.
A pivotal moment in this evolution emerges when the figure itself begins to break down. Rather than holding together as a coherent whole, the body fragments, merges, and slips between states - at once sensual and uneasy, familiar and estranged. This shift also brings a change in painterly language: gestures become looser, surfaces more volatile, and compositions more dissonant. What was once carefully rendered now teeters on the edge of excess, embracing distortion, accident, and contradiction as generative forces rather than problems to resolve.
From this point forward, Moncrief’s work opens into a broader exploration of embodiment as something fluid and unresolved. Figures no longer occupy stable ground; instead, they hover in transitional states, caught between formation and collapse. The paintings invite a kind of looking that is both compelled and unsettled, where recognition is never complete, and meaning remains in flux. In this expanded field, painting is less about arriving at an image than about staying with the tension of its continual becoming.
ANDREW MONCRIEF (b. 1987, Vancouver Island, Canada) currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Moncrief completed his BFA in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, in 2013.
Solo exhibitions include: Bardo, Duve, Berlin, Germany (2025); Moment Point, Gana Art, Seoul, South Korea (2025); Viral Bodies, On Center Gallery, Provincetown, USA (2021); Put on a Happy Face, On Center Gallery, Provincetown, USA (2019); Man Enough, Youn Gallery, Montreal, Canada (2018); Losing Face, Never Apart, Montreal, Canada (2017) and; A Strange Feeling, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, USA (2016).
Group exhibitions include: The Torment of Matter, Kunst Quartier Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2025); In The Flesh: The Nude in Art, Past and Present, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Canada (2023); Come Out & Play, BEERS London, UK (2022); Lines in the Snow: Canadian contemporary Drawing, New Art Projects, London (2022); Figuratively Speaking, Am Tacheles curated by Amir Fattal, Berlin, Germany (2021); Natural Habitat, On Center Gallery, Provincetown, USA (2019); Late Summer Group Show; On Center Gallery, Provincetown, USA (2018) and; FLORA, Youn Gallery, Montreal, Canada (2017).
