Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Roe Ethridge, presented as a pair of different but interconnected selections at the gallery's Gstaad and London locations. Happy Birthday Louise Parker II follows Ethridge's recent exhibition Happy Birthday Louise Parker, curated by Alessandro Rabottini for the Gallery at 10 Corso Como, Milan, and is named for a model with whom he collaborated on several fashion editorials beginning in 2010.
Plotting a zone between commercial, editorial, and studio photography, Ethridge explores the potential of the image in ways that transcend the categorical restrictions of conventional artistic production. While he explores a diverse array of subjects, from still-life arrangements to fashion shoots and portraits, Ethridge tackles projects with consistent formal rigor, adopting approaches that contribute nuance to the documentation of lived experience and the visual languages of design and commerce. Juxtaposing staged scenes with chanced-upon vignettes, Ethridge pursues a formal sensibility that hinges on the bending and breaking of aesthetic rules.
In works such as Louise on David's Refrigerator (2012–20) and Louise on Central Park Smoke (2023), both on view in London, Ethridge depicts Parker in the context of both styled modeling spreads and more natural, intimate situations, thereby visualizing the intertwining of life and representation, the everyday and the staged. While Louise (2014), on view in Gstaad, is an unadorned—albeit sharply detailed—head-and-shoulders portrait, Louise in a Chair for Double (2015), in London, shows Parker striking an impish pose on a seat draped in bright red fabric. An overtly styled image designed to highlight the model's attire, it was produced for the titular French fashion magazine. And as the artist's gaze meets that of his friend and collaborator, a complex interplay between photographer, camera, and subject comes into view.
Roe Ethridge’s photography emanates from his direct experience of the world. His oeuvre melds conceptual photography with commercial work, including outtakes from his own shoots and borrowed images already in circulation in other contexts. With this democratic attitude, Ethridge works to capture the vivid and intimate details of his shifting locales within photography’s classic genres of portrait, landscape, and still life. The diverse and sometimes abstruse nature of Ethridge’s imagery—vintage movie posters, fashion models, a pink rose, a mop bucket, a concrete mixer—oscillates between the spontaneous and the staged with such subtlety that it is often difficult to ascertain his elected approach with regard to individual images. Drawing upon photography’s descriptive power and its accessibility, he copies and recombines images, subverting their original status in order to regenerate their signifying possibilities, and in so doing, infuse them with a new sense of mysterious contingency.
