Gay porn magazines are piling up in Andrew Moncrief’s Lichtenberg studio. Makeshift papers from the 1950s stapled together, black-and-white photographs of wiry athletes in underpants inside; Glossy magazines from the 80s, in which tanned muscular men wear leather caps and silver curb chains. Also contemporary erotic magazines, washboard abs and tense upper arms, sticking out buttocks, erect penises.
When Moncrief leafs through his small collection, however, it has nothing to do with his private pleasure: the Canadian makes art from pornographic photographs, cuts them up, disassembles them into their individual parts in order to create collages from them, which he in turn translates into large-format paintings. What emerges are fantastic, colorful images of amorphous figures in which male body parts become visible like set pieces; an upper arm here, an armpit there, navel and nipples, male bodies alienated into abstract silhouettes.
Andrew Moncrief
A painting from Andrew Moncrief’s Gucci series Shifting Intimacies (2022), oil and acrylic on canvas
“My art,” says Andrew Moncrief during a visit to his Lichtenberg studio, “is always about me and my experiences as a gay man.” Moncrief grew up on Vancouver Island on Canada’s Pacific coast. With very conventional, masculine male role models, as he describes, the father, a brother. “It’s often said that queer people who grow up in traditional social structures lose a lot of their own personality,” he says now, “sacrificing their authenticity for a sense of security” in order not to offend, not to attract attention, to belong.
Steel-hard men’s bodies, far from nature and naturalness
Andrew Moncrief says his art helped and continues to help with self-discovery, which over the years has turned into self-acceptance, he says. The Canadian, who studied art in Montreal and Comox, initially dissected and stylized primarily self-portraits, but it was in Berlin that he found his current work with images of male bodies. Moncrief has lived here since 2020, a large part of the porn collection from which he makes his works is a gift from the Schwules Museum in Mitte. After Moncrief has cut up the erotic shots and reassembled them into a collage, he scans them or photographs them. The collages then serve as templates for his paintings.
“I’m trying to revive a technique that was used by the old masters of the Renaissance”: First he puts a black and white picture on the canvas, which he then paints over in color, similar to the black and white in the 1950s. White photos or videos were subsequently colored. “Rubens painted like this, for example,” says Moncrief and smiles mildly, knowing full well that the Flemish master’s subjects are diametrically opposed to his own pictorial content. While Rubens painted corpulent women turning and swaying in front of natural backgrounds, Moncrief’s works are shaped by men’s bodies as hard as steel, male fantasies that have little in common with nature and naturalness.
Johannes Jost
For several months the artist has been reviving the painterly techniques of the great masters.
The dissonance between the real and the ideal body
It’s the images that the porn industry produces; Images that are widespread in the gay scene. “I contrast the traditional technique of painting with contemporary themes and content,” says Moncrief. “With my paintings, I want to stimulate a discourse about the male body, about how it is currently seen and portrayed in gay contexts.” He is concerned with the dissonance between real, natural, healthy body images and the ideals, the porn stars and pumpers embody from the gym.
Andrew Moncrief
A painting from Andrew Moncrief’s Gucci series Shifting Intimacies (2022), oil and acrylic on canvas
With his themes and his works, Moncrief strikes a chord – also with the luxury brand Gucci. “I get quite a lot of messages on Instagram from people who want to buy my art, who want to visit my studio, who ask me out on a date,” he says. “But this message was different.” It was Alex Malgouyres who contacted him via social media. Gucci’s Director of Brand and Customer Loyalty suggested the artist work together, as the Italian label wanted to start a dialogue about male role models this year anyway – in the house’s collections and on projects like the one that ended up being realized with Andrew Moncrief .
Drapery and folds are reminiscent of classical portrait painting
There have been five paintings that Moncrief made for Gucci; Basically, the artist worked as with all his pictures – except that this time he staged clothed rather than unclothed bodies. He cut up and reassembled the shots that were taken during a joint fashion shoot with photographer Julien Barnés and the brand’s current men’s fashion, and finally painted pictures in which fragments of different designs become visible. Drapery and folds, which in turn are reminiscent of the classic portraiture of great masters.
Gucci
Menswear from Gucci’s Spring 2022 Love Parade collection, which Moncrief’s paintings are based on
In time for Pride Month – and men’s fashion week – the paintings were exhibited a few weeks ago at the Gucci store on Paris’ Boulevard Saint-Germain. In any case, large companies like to give themselves a rainbow-colored coat of paint for Pride Month in a way that is as effective as possible for the public – a marketing strategy that has been criticized as “pinkwashing”; a form of window dressing with which companies want to present themselves as activists without actually doing anything for the rights of gays and lesbians, queer or transgender people.
Bodies and clichés disintegrate into barely recognizable individual parts
“It’s different with Gucci,” says Andrew Moncrief. In fact, the fashion brand has attracted attention in recent years with its commitment: The specially developed website “Gucci Equilibrium” supports corresponding initiatives and makes them visible, internally the Italian company should strive for as diverse a workforce as possible. And the fashion of the current creative director Alessandro Michele breaks down gender boundaries anyway.
Following the exhibition, Moncrief’s paintings were purchased by Gucci and are now part of the label’s art collection. The artist is now working on his own works again, devoting himself to the naked bodies again, dismantling nude photographs into their skin-colored individual parts. Doesn’t he sometimes get tired of working his way through the porn magazines over and over again? Bored with the next muscular lower leg, the next tight bicep? “Not until now, actually,” says Andrew Moncrief, pausing for a moment to think. “My work with these pictures is very abstract, I zoom in extremely, get extremely close until the bodies fall into barely recognizable individual parts.” Just like the clichés and ideals associated with these bodies.