Pornhub launches Scrubhub To Encourage Handwashing And Collect Donations

Pornhub, the premier online destination for adult entertainment, in partnership with creative duo Ani Acopian and Suzy Shinn, today announced the launch of Scrubhub, a collection of satirical videos made by everyday people as well as select Pornhub models -- including Pornhub Brand Ambassador Asa Akira, Angela White, Austin Wolf and others. The site focuses on the mundane yet very necessary task of handwashing through the lens of humor and entertainment. In addition to comical videos under the guise of typical Pornhub genres, Scrubhub will host live takeovers twice daily at 12 p.m. PST and 6 p.m. PST, featuring a range of personalities, from musicians to comedians and beyond. Donations will be collected via Scrubhub for two charitable organizations born out of COVID-19; Invisible Hands, which is a volunteer-based program that delivers groceries and supplies to the elderly, disabled and immunocompromised in the New York area, and Frontline Foods, who donate healthy meals to hospital clinicians in Los Angeles by partnering with local restaurants who have been devastated by the pandemic. Pornhub will be making an initial donation in support of these initiatives as well. Click here to visit.

Watch Doug Aitken's Experimental Short Film "Autumn" (1994) Starring Chloe Sevigny

In the case of Autumn, Aitken wanted to create three music videos, each with their own narrative, to be aired separately at different times as part of his commercial production. The resulting video, shown in galleries, fuses together the three separate narratives in a non-linear fashion. Located on the precipice between the oft-thought mutually exclusive realms of art and entertainment, Autumn stands as an emblematic example of Aitken’s video practice, investigating the cultural numbness generated by the flow of media images.

Watch John Baldessari's Short Experimental Film "Title" (1973)

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence.

Read Our Review Of Cristine Brache's Solo Exhibition @ Fierman Gallery by Adam Lehrer →

Artist Cristine Brache has developed an interest in surrealism. For her recent exhibition, Commit Me, Commit to Me (Cázame, Cásame) at New York’s Fierman Gallery, the artist has created a sculptural installation rife with references to some of the surrealist movement’s most important female practitioners. In particular, the anthropomorphic forms and hybridity between body and object of the figurative sculpture that functions as the installation’s centerpiece, Woman Getting Reupholstered, recalls those soft sculptures of Dorothea Tanning such as Nue Couchée, 1969. Click here to read more.

Watch Jack Hazan's 1974 Feature Length Film "A Bigger Splash" About David Hockney And His Muse

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A Bigger Splash is a 1973 (sometimes cited as 1974) British biographical documentary film about David Hockney's lingering breakup with his then partner Peter Schlesinger, from 1970 to 1973. Directed by Jack Hazan, and edited by David Mingay, it has music by Patrick Gowers. Featuring many of Hockney's circle, it includes designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, artist Patrick Procktor, gallery owner John Kasmin and museum curator Henry Geldzahler. It is a fly on the wall documentary, intercut with fictionalised and fantasy elements. It was groundbreaking and remains notable for its treatment of gay themes and its insights into his life and work during an important period in Hockney's life. The film takes its title from A Bigger Splash, perhaps Hockney's best known Californian swimming pool picture. Hockney was initially shocked by its intimacy but later changed his mind. Click here to watch.

Read A Conversation Between Sasha Grey and Maurizio Cattelan →

SASHA GREY How do you deal with doubt?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I doubt myself all the time. I consider it a friend of mine. It grounds me and I question myself a lot. In the end, I always go with my gut. I move forward even when I feel like I am skating on thin ice. I have come to find: the thinner the ice, the less I doubt myself.

Click here to read the full conversation.

Mamma Andersson "The Lost Paradise" At David Zwirner In New York


David Zwirner presents an exhibition of recent paintings by Mamma Andersson, to be on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York. This will be the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery. Characterized as a unique combination of textured brushstrokes, loose washes, stark graphic lines, and evocative colors, Mamma Andersson’s works embody a new genre of landscape painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her often panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up: mountainous backdrops, trees, snow, and wooden cabins are recurrent elements within her works. Yet, rather than conveying specific spatial or temporal reference points, they revolve around the expression of atmospheres and subjective moods and frequently appear to merge the past, the present, and the future. Mamma Andersson "The Lost Paradise" At David Zwirner In New York will be on view until April 11 at David Zwirner in New York. Installation images Courtesy David Zwirner

Opening Of "All Of Them Witches" Organized by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Arcmanoro Niles First Solo Show On The West Coast At UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles

UTA Artist Space presents Arcmanoro Niles’ first solo show on the West Coast, titled I Guess By Now I’m Supposed To Be A Man: I’m Just Trying To Leave Behind Yesterday.

In the central gallery space, Niles debuts a series of seven large-scale paintings that explore personal journeys at various stages of life. Underscoring how our relationships and experiences shift our attitude over the course of our lifetime, the series opens with a child absorbed in the workings of a model train set and ends with an elderly man in a doctor’s office, hands clasped as he weighs the heavy notion of mortality. 

Niles takes us room-by-room through his highly saturated interiors to show figures in states of deep introspection: a young adult is slumped against a bathtub; a couple is in the intimate surroundings of their bedroom; and a middle-aged man contemplatively faces his reflection in a mirror. Some seem aware of our presence and meet our gaze with a challenging stare, while some appear more vulnerable with heads bowed or turned away. Each painting is disrupted by Niles’s signature “seekers”—small, outlined creatures representing an impulsive force influencing his characters—that break Niles’s traditional portraiture compositions and add to the otherworldly feel. 

Niles additionally presents a series of new small-scale portraits depicting friends and family members, and a number of paintings he has made over the past three years. While his other paintings offer cinematic narratives, often rendered to human scale, these intimate portraits allow a closer examination of his subjects as individuals.

On view until March 14 at UTA Artist Space, 403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Sam Anderson's I Never Loved Your Mind @ Tanya Leighton in Berlin

Sam Anderson’s sculptures resemble prototypes, directly expressed and emptied of unnecessary detail that might over-define their meanings. The show’s title implies a potential, singular narrative, yet Anderson privileges a plurality in which no one protagonist drives the plot. Objects and ideas are collected and arranged in spite of their differences in materiality and characterisation.

Sculptures with titles such as ‘Imagination’ and ‘Opportunists’ illustrate these hard to depict concepts. They do not narrativise them, aiming rather to define them visually. The faceless figures strung together in ‘Opportunists’ move backward and forward, both entering and exiting an open door frame. Likewise, the features of the two sandwich-board men, who serve as the emblem for ‘Imagination’ are so rounded that it is easy to confuse which direction they face. A negotiation takes place between determinate and indeterminate elements. The implication of language paired with minimal gesture creates an evocative psychological space wherein the audience fills in the finer details.

I Never Loved Your Mind will be on view throughout March 7 at Tanya Leighton Kurfürstenstraße 156 & 24/25 10785 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Highlights From The 2020 Felix Art Fair At The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel In Los Angeles

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Highlights From The 2020 Frieze Art Fair At Paramount Studios In Los Angeles

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Meyer Riegger Berlin Presents Anna Lea Hucht: What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?

In Anna Lea Hucht’s What are you doing the rest of your life?, the artist’s interest in material surfaces remains a driving force. Continuing her series of still lifes, she allows us to participate directly in the highly-charged relationship between photography and painting. Her still lifes are only recognizable as paintings upon detailed inspection, so close is their similarity to the photographic originals in black-and-white. Isolated from space and time, objects thus stand in the centre of the pictorial event where, additionally staged with a realistic interplay of light and shade, they shift the focus of the visitor onto the wholly distinctive and particular aesthetics of the world of things.

Alongside her intensive ongoing concern for objects, the artist is exhibiting four watercolors, which, inspired by the same curiosity concerning structures, examine the nature and regularity of fur. The fable-like creatures, whose faces and legs are furry, find themselves positioned opposite and in rich contrast to a watercolor of a hortus conclusus, out of which a dog stares, whose skin is not worked out in detail. In the background, however, the beholder can study the jungle-like plant world of the garden. As so often in Hucht’s oeuvre, we gaze here into a fantasy realm in which the known and the unusual are combined in a willful, idiosyncratic manner.  

What are you doing the rest of your life? is on view through March 7 at Meyer Rigger Schaperstrasse 14 10719 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Universal Fatigue: A Solo Exhibition By Mircea Suciu @ Blain | Southern in New York

Part of the Cluj School, Mircea Suciu (b. 1978) is regarded as one of Romania’s leading artists. During his formative years he witnessed the country’s tumultuous transition after the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the 1989 revolutions. Describing himself as an image creator rather than a traditional painter, Suciu mines and references art history and contemporary imagery, reducing down the elements and adding color-coded symbolism. He has ‘his own complex way of making things in which painting, photography, drawing and print all cooperate while playing their individual parts.’

Inspired by his former studies on the restoration of Baroque paintings, Suciu has developed a process he calls ‘monoprinting’. A photographic image is split into a grid of A4 surfaces, each one printed on an acetate sheet, onto which a layer of acrylic paint is applied. The paint acts as a ‘glue’ that adheres directly to the canvas and once dry, the acetate sheet is peeled off. The result is a transference of the printed image with associated faults and imperfections, which Suciu then 'restores' by re-painting with oil and acrylic paint. Sometimes, as with works in the Disintegration series, he overlays the image multiple times using various colors until he creates a surface that is barely recognizable from the original. As a final stage the whole image is repainted. This multi-layered process creates compositions of reinvented images which allude to history, memory and the eventual dissolution of all things.

Universal Fatigue is on view throughout February 22 at Blain | Southern 547 W 25th St, New York, NY. Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern.  Photo by Cooper Dodd: