Roe Ethridge and Nobuyoshi Araki’s Subversive Still Lifes Hit New York

Summary

• A new show at Anton Kern Gallery in New York pairs work by photographers Roe Ethridge and Nobuyoshi Araki
• On view through July 2, the exhibition brings forth archival works by Araki, alongside new and “revisted” works by Ethridge

American artist Roe Ethridge opens the Nobuyoshi Araki archive for a new duet show at New York’s Anton Kern Gallery. Araki, known for his confessional “I-Photography” style, and Ethridge, a notable pop pictorialist, share the stage for the first time , united by talents for visual tension and their painterly, juxtapositional approaches to the camera.

Curated and sequence by Ethridge himself, the exhibition offers up trove of still lifes, nudes and floral arrangements, bridging the artists’s distinct aesthetic codes. Ethridge presents two new prints from his dreamy, pinhole Floral Arrangements series from the ’90s, a decision sparked by Araki’s Liquitex-drenched Painted Flowers (2004), evoking the quiet banality of suburban ornament and memories of his mother’s calendars.

He puts these in conversation with cuts from Araki’s archive, notably Flower Cemetery and Tokyo Nude. Staged erotic scenes are layered against the grit of Tokyo backstreets, moving between the public and private, while the typical politeness of floral beauty is disrupted by uncanny plastic figures, peppered throughout the works.

Ethridge takes cues from Araki’s instinctiveness  in “Landing in Tokyo,” an iPhone snap of Mount Fuji taken from an airplane window, and “Rainbow over Shore Front Parkway,” a sublime shot of what comes after rain. Both tap in to the visceral mode of documentation that characterizes the Japanese master, reconstructed through universal, contemporary gestures.

Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge is now on view at Anton Kern Gallery’s main gallery and 91 Walker window through July 2.

Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street,
New York, NY 10022