Ryan Huggins
Frieze London
14–18 October 2026
Preview: Wednesday 14 October, 11 am–7 pm
a. SQUIRE presents four oil paintings by Ryan Huggins at Frieze London 2026.
Behind red velvet curtains, a telescopic room ending with a screen. This is Globus, a porn cinema tucked between a café and a pharmacy in Düsseldorf. Ryan Huggins has painted it four times. Like the other images in his kino series, it is recomposed from a year of smudged memories, the culmination of repeat visits and sexual solicitations politely declined. On the Friday of that week in late winter, two men along the back row kiss in the half light of the projection overhead. Feathered light spills down the walls. On the Saturday, a debonair observer in blue jeans (the artist?) looks on. The delicately stained chalk ground of the projection behind him resembles a watercolour, an indefinite picture of desire dwarfing a room of worshippers.
Then we stray into the mulberry realm of Duplexx Schöneberg, which radiates spectacularly towards us, its name overlayed above as if in a vintage title sequence. In this concertinaed cavern, every surface avails itself for the projection of fantasies. A blown-up stud tips his leather cap to the scene in salute. And finally at Boyberry, another Berlin hotspot, a basement arcade of competing attentions is arrayed. Here, the ‘screen’ manifests as glowing white sex billboards and a coy, translucent partition. Yet only one figure pays any notice to the pre-recorded action, his back to the fourth wall. “KINO,” proclaims the frieze with the same indifference.
At Frieze, the booth is occupied by four Formica cubicles. Each one contains a vision of a corresponding kino, which hangs in the place of a television screen. The benches and partitions enable semi-secluded viewing, and in so doing reproduce the scopophilic logic of the porno cabin, or the blinkering of Peter Kubelka’s ‘Invisible Cinema’. Amid the isolationism of the digital sphere, Huggins’ kino paintings convey the sanctity of private pleasures in analogue places.
Four works are on view concurrently in Jetzt im Kino, the artist’s second solo exhibition at a. SQUIRE. An essay by theatre and opera director-scenographer Fabio Cherstich, whose research encompasses a gay lineage spanning Larry Stanton, Darrel Ellis, Patrick Angus and Jimmy Wright, accompanies the booth and exhibition.
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.
