Gagosian presents Rude in the Good Way, a photography exhibition by Roe Ethridge, opening at the gallery’s Athens space on January 22, 2026.
Known for his long-standing relationship with fashion and contemporary culture, Roe Ethridge has collaborated extensively with international publications such as Vogue, W, and Art Review, as well as with leading fashion houses including Chanel, Comme des Garçons, Marc Jacobs, among others. Through his distinctive photographic practice, he consistently blurs the boundaries between commercial and artistic photography, bringing images originally produced in studios or for editorial commissions into the spaces of galleries and museums.
The exhibition marks the artist’s return to the Greek capital. In a previous project in Athens, Ethridge identified parallels between the hybrid nature of his practice and the multilayered symbolism of the Erechtheion. Exploring the boundaries between commercial, editorial, and studio photography, Ethridge encourages both the collision and the merging of different forms and styles. In Rude in the Good Way, he creates visual and conceptual connections between his images, both through their juxtaposition in the exhibition space and through their presentation in the eponymous book released concurrently with the exhibition.
Rude in the Good Way brings together fashion shoots, portraits, still-life images, and interior photographs, incorporating diverse modes of expression and visual codes. The work Chanel No 5 from 1924 on Tray of Pearls and Mirror Checkerboard (2025) emerged following an invitation from the House of Chanel to explore its extensive archives. From this process, Ethridge selected a vintage bottle of Chanel No 5, which evoked childhood memories of his mother. The iconic fashion house reappears in Double Red Chanel (2025), a work based on Lila Moss’s recent cover for the November 2025 issue of Vogue Japan. By layering two versions of the same image at different scales, one atop the other, Ethridge places the model’s doubled figure against a doubled sunset, creating a formal echo that reverberates throughout the composition.
Three images depicting Ethridge’s partner and close collaborator, writer Lulu Sylbert, are among the most personal photographs the artist has created to date. Works such as the pin-up–inspired Lulu in Green Lace and Fishnets (2025) capture, with intensity and immediacy, the details of Sylbert’s body and lingerie, presenting a subject defined by her own creative agency. In these photographs, Ethridge and Sylbert collaborate to explore how erotic images can be produced while avoiding inequalities of power. (A comparable sensual charge is also present in LU Cookie Half Melted [2025], where the camera focuses on two cookies, their melting chocolate coating, and a drop spilled onto a dark fabric background.)
In other works, Ethridge plays with the conventions of still life. Double Apple on the Beach_v2 (2020) once again employs the technique of multiple exposures, lending a psychedelic dimension to an otherwise simple fruit composition. In Gohar Candle (2022), the artist focuses closely on a lit candle by the New York–based brand Gohar, evoking similar motifs in the history of art—perhaps most directly the photorealistic paintings of Gerhard Richter from the early 1980s, which themselves drew inspiration from the vanitas compositions of the 16th and 17th centuries.
However, while Richter’s candle radiates calm and stillness, Ethridge’s candle appears assailed by air, its melting wax drops lending the image a dramatic, almost baroque intensity.
Two photographs from 2008 were taken in the studio of painter John Currin. Flowers at John Currin Studio (2008/2025) presents a tightly framed detail of a lush, multicolored bouquet, while John Currin’s Studio March 2, 2008 (2008/2025) depicts a rolling table filled with paints and brushes, a wooden chair, and a fleeting, suggestive glimpse of three of the painter’s provocative nude works. Commissioned by Art Review magazine, these images revisit the historically complex relationship between photography and painting, while also resonating with Ethridge’s contemporary exploration of romantic and creative exchange.
Photographs from the exhibition are included in the eponymous book, published in January by Loose Joints.
ROE ETHRIDGE
Rude in the Good Way
Opening: Thursday, January 22, 6–8 PM
January 22–March 7, 2026
22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens
