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.
