In Humour Is The Saving Thing, Jonni Cheatwood is presented alongside Sebastian Neeb to
question how meaning is constructed through approaches that prioritise experimentation, material tension, and a deliberately rough-hewn physicality. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, the exhibition highlights process, gesture, and the psychological charge embedded within acts of making.
In both artistic practices, materiality is inseparable from meaning. For Cheatwood, a Brazilian- American living in contemporary America, his practice explores the formation of identity as something embodied and negotiated rather than declared. The act of stitching and sewing textiles into his compositions is not simply a formal decision but a structural one. The tension between clashing patterns and visibly stressed sutures creates surfaces that feel held together through effort. These seams operate as sites of both rupture and repair, points where disparate elements are forced into relation. His painterly gestures move across these unstable grounds, suggesting propulsion, improvisation, and bodily momentum. Through process, Cheatwood stages movement as a negotiation between impulse and resistance, where freedom emerges not from limitlessness but from working within constraint.
Figures in Cheatwood’s work are often caught mid-action; dancing, balancing, working, steadying one another. Their bodies imply instruction and adaptation: posture corrected, rhythm learned, weight redistributed. A figure guiding another becomes emblematic of the work itself, where meaning forms through interplay - between support and strain, autonomy and reliance. Expression is never purely spontaneous; it is shaped by pressure, memory, and the conditions under which it unfolds.
Neeb, who lives and works in Berlin, has a practice grounded in absurdity and distortion, similarly probing how internal logics - personal, psychological, and symbolic - structure the ways we perceive and orient ourselves within the world. He engages similar tensions through a language of awkwardness and exaggeration. His figures appear grotesque or comical, suspended between competence and vulnerability. Limbs stretch, compress, or buckle under implied forces, as though the body were testing its own limits. Humour in his work arises not from mockery but from displacement - from the uncanny moment when a familiar form behaves unexpectedly. His sculptures and images suggest objects or bodies poised in readiness, yet somehow ill-fitted to their purpose, caught in a perpetual rehearsal.
As Mark Twain famously wrote, “Humour is the saving thing.” This is evident across both practices as humour becomes a method for navigating psychological weight. It introduces elasticity into systems that might otherwise feel rigid. Through absurd proportions, exaggerated gestures, or deliberately unresolved surfaces, the artists create spaces where instability is acknowledged rather than concealed. Movement, whether literal or implied, becomes a metaphor for adaptation: the body adjusting, the material resisting, the surface holding.
Rather than positioning art as a vehicle for overt declaration, Cheatwood and Neeb allow playfulness and contradiction to generate inquiry. Their works dismantle expectations about coherence and finish, favouring a state of productive tension. The viewer is invited not to decode a message, but to inhabit a field of forces - pressure and release, balance and imbalance, control and surrender.
Here, humour operates as a release valve within systems of constraint. It allows complexity to
remain intact without collapsing into didacticism. In an era defined by acceleration and rigidity, these works insist on elasticity - on the possibility that meaning can remain fluid, that bodies can adapt, and that constraint itself may become the very condition through which movement - and even freedom - becomes visible.
JONNI CHEATWOOD (b. 1986, Thousand Oaks, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Arizona State University, Tempe, in 2011.
Solo exhibitions and fairs include: Wrong Time, Right Silence, Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2025); Untitled Art Miami with Makasiini Contemporary, Miami, USA ((2024); KIAF Seoul with OTI LA (2023); Taipei Dangdai (solo booth), with Makasiini Contemporary, Taiperi, Taiwan (2023); Toeing the Line, Gallery All, Shanghai, China (2023); An Unlikely Hero, Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2022); The Juice Is Loose, OTI LA (2022); Expo Chicago (solo booth), Makasiini Contemporary, Chicago, USA (2021); It Might Be Me, Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2021); LIVE! From Therapy, BEERS London, London (2021); Fresh Out of Fiddles, Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2020);Tyger Tyger, Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany (2019); That’s Dallas Baby, Artual Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Dressed Up for the Letdown OTI, Hong Kong, (2018); She’s Heavy on the Razzmatazz, Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2018); Volta Show (solo booth), BEERS London, New York, USA (2018); Same Hero, New Boots, TW Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018) and; Strange to Meet You, Tappan, Los Angeles, USA (2017)
Group exhibitions include: Throughline: The Continuum of Art, Hamilton-Selway Fine Art, Los Angeles (2025); The Figure Remains, Hollis Taggart, New York (2025); Beyond The Frame, Sands Gallery, Macao, China (2025); Guest of a Guest, The Hole, New York (2025); People Matter, Artelli, Macao, China (2025); Vultus: Liminal Faces, Eligere, Seoul, Korea (2025); Summer Show, Allouche Gallery, New York, USA (2024); Contemporary Selections, Hollis Taggart, New York, USA (2024); Shadow Boxing, OTI, Los Angeles, USA (2023); About Art with Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2023); The New Contemporaries Vol III, Residency Art Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2023); Second Wind, Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany (2023); Reminisce, Hollis Taggart, New York, USA (2023); It’s Not Just A Portrait, Badr El Jundi, Marbella, Spain (2021); LA In Bloom, Werkartz, Los Angeles (2020); Rise & Shine, OTI, Hong Kong (2020); Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Unlearn, Relearn… Repeat, TW Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019); Seven Days Are Too Long, Mirus Gallery, Denver, USA (2019); The Atlantic Bridge, Galerie Kremers, Berlin, Germany (2019); Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Werkartz, Los Angeles, USA (2019); Office Hours, Main Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2018); View from the Cheap Seats, Chimento Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA (2018); Summer Salon, BEERS London, London, UK (2018); Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2018); Constructed, Saatchi Art, Santa Monica, USA (2018); The Urban Experience, Artual Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2018); FRESHAF, TW Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia (2017); Buy What You Love, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York, USA (2017); 75 Works on Paper, BEERS London (2017); Meat and Potatoes, Santa Fe Art Colony, Los Angeles, USA (2016); Concrete Matter & Liquefied Horizons, Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills, USA (2016); Grafforists, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, USA (2016); and Wielding Now, Tappan, Los Angeles, USA (2016).
SEBASTIAN NEEB (b. 1980, Güstrow, Germany) currently lives and works in Berlin. Neeb graduated with a Master's from the University of the Arts in Berlin in 2009.
Solo Exhibitions include: Manipulation Through Entertainment, Ernst Barlach Museum, Güstrow (2025); Geschindel, REITER Gallery, Berlin (2023); Dilettante Kartoffeln wetteifern um die Gunst des Vaters, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Ludwigsburg (2020); Waving Back When Being Waved At, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Ludwigsburg (2019); and We Just Need Another Hero, Ignore the Circumstances, REITER Gallery, Berlin (2019).
Group Exhibitions include: The Big Fatigue, Schlachthof, Berlin (2025); Halt, Galerie Leuenroth, Frankfurt (2024); Kreatur, REITER Gallery, Berlin (2022;) Gilded, Museum Château de Nyon, Nyon, Schweiz (2022); A Curious Imprint of Reality w. Marion Fink, BEERS London, London (2019) and Contemporary Visions VII, BEERS London, London (2017).
