Ryan Huggins: Jetzt im Kino

A spellbound participant-observer, Ryan Huggins recounts the architectures, communities and rites of homosocial spaces, his vantage split between desiring spectatorship and ethnographic remove. In a new group of eight paintings developed over the last year, he attends to the discreet world of the German sex kino.

To research the works, Huggins visited and revisited the full spectrum of these palaces, which have mostly evolved beyond the old-school setup of the porn cinema as it flourished in West Germany in the 1970s into the multi-hyphenated realms of today—magazine shops and sex toy boutiques rolled into dancefloors and bars-cum-cruising alley labyrinths. Jetzt im Kino [Now Playing] casts the spotlight on three such locations. Huggins’ reconstructions from memory (photography is verboten) of Scheune and Duplexx in Berlin, and Globus in Düsseldorf, serve as establishing shots for a multi-scene skin flick within which the picture-in-picture studio porn is always already rolling.

In the kino paintings, primal figures are dwarfed by the grandeur of their surroundings, which are conveyed to us with the perspectival factitude of an Etienne Bouhot. Yet these are constructed images, built on dimly-lit recollections and a painter’s instincts. Accordingly, the porno’s prevalence becomes a device and a shorthand for artifice. On the backlit or projection screens overhead, stills pulled from adult printed matter and online videos alternate between hardcore scenes and seemingly introspective or solitary moments. Real encounters happen on the back row at Globus.

Huggins’ enclaves unfold before us, proffering glimpses and suggestions but never quite dispelling a private mystique that lies beneath.

Four works are on view in Jetzt im Kino, his second solo exhibition at a. SQUIRE. A parallel presentation of four paintings will be shown at Frieze London in October. An essay by theatre and opera director and scenographer Fabio Cherstich, whose research encompasses a gay lineage spanning Patrick Angus, Darrel Ellis, Larry Stanton and Jimmy Wright, accompanies both the exhibition and booth.

Ryan Huggins (b. 1991, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; lives and works in Berlin, DE) is a graduate of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied in the class of Tomma Abts. Recent solo exhibitions include Call Boys, Pimps & Dealers, Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne (2025); This is Life, Galerie Khoshbakht, New York (2025); and PLUTO, a. SQUIRE, London (2024). His paintings are currently on view in the survey exhibition Sex Work. A Cultural History at Bundeskunthalle, Bonn.

Text by Fabio Cherstich.