Roe Ethridge
Le Luxe
May 6 – July 2, 2011
The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present the fifth solo exhibition by New York-based photographer Roe Ethridge. The show will feature both recent works as well as works that come out of a series spanning six years.
Themes of inventories, personal vs. commissioned, analog vs. digital, the term Le Luxe; the title of two Matisse paintings dated 1907 and 1913, and its context in regards to luxury brands, the everyday luxuries of time, and shrimp cocktail are explored in recent works. These are presented alongside images selected from a commission that Ethridge recently finished for Goldman Sachs spanning six years and documenting the construction of their new headquarters to create a non-descriptive, if not abstract “snapshot” of the experience of living in New York in a specific time and space, utilizing classic photo formats of landscape, portraiture, still life documentarian and abstraction.
This sporadic movement between the thematic and formal is what drives Ethridge's work. The spaces between the subjects are where the viewer is invited to assume what has been cut out: an unending stream of connective threads that if included, would have yielded a nearly linear body of work. Instead, he edits, setting up complex relationships between his genres of imagery. All images are of equal importance and form a visual fugue-like structure.
“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.” – Roxana Marcocci, MoMA.
The show will be accompanied by the completion of a monograph published by Mack of the same name.
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 Pontégnie in 2012.