Roe Ethridge’s Rude in the Good Way takes desire as both its subject and its working method. Working through his characteristically oblique, offhand style, Ethridge lets sexuality, identity, seduction and the camera drift into the same plane, never fully separating one from the other. Loosely woven fugues of images converge, always cheekily winking toward something just out of frame: technicolor flash typologies of mouldy peaches, hyper-composite images of Lindsay Lohan, and Chanel still lifes both luxurious and lurid move alongside intimate, dressed-down snapshots of Ethridge’s collaborator Lulu Sylbert, unresolved glimpses into painter John Currin’s erotically charged studio, sarcastic self-portraits, and constant callbacks to the unmistakable image world Ethridge has built over the past twenty years, where photographs refuse to be pinned down or left unstimulated.
These fragments ask us, like the title itself, what is rude and what is not. A polished image, a casual glitch, a throwaway snapshot, a luxury still life, a screenshot from a weather station webcam? Ethridge sharpens his polychronic world to a point where desire, consumption and self-presentation overlap so completely that the photographs begin to test our own appetites: what we see, what we want and how we perform.
Collaboratively edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon and the artist, Rude in the Good Way accompanies a solo exhibition at Gagosian Athens, 22 January to 07 March 2026. Roe Ethridge (b. 1969, Miami) lives and works in New York and is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary conceptual photography. Working fluidly between commercial and art contexts, Ethridge merges imagery drawn from fashion, advertising, and daily life with art-historical genres, using the real to suggest or disrupt the ideal. His photographs explore the increasingly porous boundary between the generic and the personal, and the way images gain new meaning through sequencing, recombination, and reuse.
Ethridge has published more than fifteen books, including American Polychronic (MACK, 2022), Neighbors (MACK, 2016), Sacrifice Your Body (MACK, 2014), Le Luxe (MACK, 2011), and Rockaway, NY (SteidlMACK, 2007). His commercial collaborations include major ongoing projects with Calvin Klein, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton. Significant solo presentations include Momentum 4, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005); Charles Riva Collection, Brussels (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon, and M Museum Leuven (2012–13); and a major mid-career survey, Nearest Neighbor, at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, for the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial. He was included in New Photography 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in the Whitney Biennial (2008), and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011. The book is published by Loose Joints: 112pp, 235 x 300 mm, section-sewn softcover with paper flaps, designed by Loose Joints Studio (LJ219, January 2026; ISBN 978-1-912719-72-3).
