ROE ETHRIDGE
Lives and works in New York.
Ethridge’s work has shown extensively in the United States and internationally. He was recently included in the New Photography show at the MoMA and the Les Recontres D’Arles Photography Show and Prize, and recently short-listed for the Deutsche-Boerse Prize for Photography. He was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2008, and will have a major retrospective at Le Consortium in Dijon curated by Anne Pontegnie in 2012.
Roe Ethridge (American, born 1969) studied photography at the Atlanta College of Art. He shoots in “editorial mode” and also borrows images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own commercial work, sometimes already published in other contexts. “Everything seems to end up in a magazine sooner or later,” Ethridge has said. Drawing upon the descriptive power of photography and the ease with which it can be accessed, duplicated, and recombined, the artist orchestrates visual fugues, juxtaposing, for example, a picture in which he has superimposed an image of a plain white plate, grabbed from Bed Bath & Beyond’s website, on a checkered Comme des Garçons scarf; a photograph of a model dressed in an Alexander McQueen shirt posing against a tripod, which he took at Pier 59 in New York; two filmic pictures of a Julliard ballet student; a still life of moldy fruit he previously published in Vice magazine; a catwalk shot from the Chanel spring 2009 fashion show grabbed from The New York Times; an image of a pumpkin that is a magnified close-up of a sticker; and a picture of a red bag in a corner of the artist’s studio. The pictures acquire their meaning from the salient way in which they have been shuffled, sequenced, and laid out in nonlinear narrative structures. Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs’ original roles and renews their signifying possibilities.
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
Roe Ethridge arranges his large-format photographs into series whose precise meaning remains elusive. His gallery installations and book projects mix fine-art photographs and commercial images, including outtakes from his illustrational magazine work. A polished studio portrait may be juxtaposed with a grainy still-life drawn from a retail catalogue or a cropped shot of signage in a strip mall. At first glance the groupings may seem like selections from a stock-photography archive, but they are infused with an element of nostalgia and the uncanny. Images that feel familiar begin to take on an eerie sense of mystery when juxtaposed in the artist’s seemingly random arrays.
- Jason Edward Kaufman for Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008
As technically adept as a commercial photographer yet as thoughtful as a Conceptualist about photography’s role and meaning in the modern world, Ethridge believes the ubiquity of the photograph and the instantaneity of its transmission and reception in this age of increasing “ecstatic communication” is to be embraced rather than mourned. In his work there appears no cause and no ending, no discrimination between editorial and art, between document and construct, between technology and affect.
- Kate Bush for Art Forum, October, 2003
CLIENTS
Balenciaga Fragrance
Comme Des Garcon
Goldman Sachs
Barneys New York
Proenza Schouler
PUPLICATIONS
New York Times Magazine
New Yorker
Art Forum
W Magazine
PRESS
2008: The Journal, Whitewall, Whitney Biennial
2006: Modern Painters
2003: ARTFORUM (Kate Bush)
2002: ARTFORUM (TopTen), Flash Art
2000: Contemporary
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011 Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Les Recontres d’Arles, Garage, Moscow Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
2010 Greengrassi, London, England Les Recontres d’Arles, Arles France
2009 Sunset Studio, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium Farewell Horse, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2008 Roe Ethridge, Sutton Lane, Paris, France Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY
2007 Medium, St. Barthélemy Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland "greengrassi", London England
2006 Gagosian Gallery, “Apple and Cigarettes” Beverly Hills, CA
2005 Andrew Kreps Gallery, “County Line Plus Town and Country” New York, NY
2005 Institute of Contemporary Art “Momentum 4” Boston, MA London, UK
2004 Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY
2003 Roe Ethridge, Greengrassi Gallery, London
2002 The Bow, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY
2000 Young Pines, Model Portraits, UPS Drivers, Ambulance Accident, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY Robert Pearre Gallery, Tucson AZ
1999 Floral Arrangements & Neutral Territory, Galerie Oliver Schweden, Munich, Germany Neutral Territory, Vankin Schwartz Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Neutral Territory, Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Hidden Branches, Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, NY
1997 Floral Arrangements, Scalo Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland
1995 Mystique of the Ordinary: Portraits and Still-lives, Block Candy Art Gallery, Atlanta GA
MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
2010 Museum of Modern Art, New York
2008 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY
2007 Artist in and Out of Colonge, Henry Art Gallery, Faye G. Allen Center for the Visual Arts, Seattle, WA (with Gareth James)
2005 Momentum 4 : Roe Ethridge, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
2004 I Feel Mysterious Today, Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach Florida
The Big Nothing, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Bennett Simpson, Philadelphia, PD
2003 Doing Business: Dysfunctional Corporate Culture,î University of Connecticut Contemporary Art Galleries, Storrs and Stamford, CT
Roe Ethridge: Junction, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN
2002 The Bow, The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN
Hello My Name IsÖ, Carnegie Museum of Art, curated by Laura Hoptman, Pittsburgh, PA
2001 The Americans, The Barbican Center, London, UK Rocks and Trees, Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA