As the calendar heralds spring, London’s art world is gearing up for a delightfully playful yet deeply critical encounter at the Saatchi Gallery in early April. BEERS London brings together Canadian painter Andrew Moncrief and German sculptor Sebastian Neeb under the title The Wink & Nudge, pushing the boundaries of meaning, materiality, and how art is “supposed” to behave. Opening on April 2, this exhibition invites the viewer through the solemn doors of art only to whisper a stylish joke in their ear.
Berlin-based painter Andrew Moncrief approaches figurative painting from the inside out. The figures on his canvases feel less like conventional bodies and more like remnants of flesh, bone, and occasionally something veering toward the ridiculous. In scenes that echo the giants Francis Bacon or Jenny Saville, the artist seems to have removed the subject from the stage, leaving behind only traces of the process. Instead of a finished product, Moncrief presents us with raw material and marginal notes, inviting us into an “anti-portrait” universe. This is a pictorial arena that demands the viewer fill in the gaps with their own mind — open to infinite readings with every glance.
On the sculptural side, Sebastian Neeb shares a similar preoccupation with waste and absurdity. In Neeb’s world, the heroes are not central characters but the sidelined, odd, grotesque, and slightly awkward figures pushed to the edges of the story. His mobile mini-sculptures strike a balance that is both seductive and unsettling, as if proving Mark Twain’s remark that “humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.” Like characters who have stepped straight out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, Neeb builds imaginary awards for the outcasts and monumental totems for discarded figures. His works function as quiet (and sometimes loud) parodies of a modern society built on spectacle and reward.
Perhaps the deepest common ground between these two artists is that they both live in Berlin — the historical refuge of freaks and curiosities. Echoing Franz von Suppé’s famous line, “You’re mad, my child — you must go to Berlin!”, the pair dismantles so-called “high” forms of art from within, with full awareness. In an era when art is increasingly trapped in visual bombardment and the numbness of repetition, Moncrief and Neeb refuse to deliver clean answers. For them, art is not about conclusive results; it is a methodology that preserves fragility, instability, and dissonance.
The very title — “The Wink & Nudge” — captures their method perfectly: one foot firmly planted in the discipline of art history, the other in the satire that shakes that discipline to its core. The Wink & Nudge invites us to a grand joke whose setup we may have missed, but whose operatic final laugh we get to share. The exhibition runs until May 6 at Duke of York’s HQ — but be warned: the one doing the winking might turn out to be you.
