Upcoming at Anton Kern Gallery:
Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge
Opening Tuesday, May 12 with a reception from 6-8PM
Anton Kern Gallery presents Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge, a photography exhibition selected and sequenced by Ethridge, that brings together two series from Araki’s archive alongside works by Ethridge, both new and revisited.
For the exhibition, Ethridge has created new prints for his series Floral Arrangements (1995–1997/2026): pinhole photographs of carnations, daisies, and other flowers bought in bulk and arranged in thrift store vases that he painted, against floral textile fabrics. For each image, he worked directly onto the textiles using acrylic paint, editing their existing patterns—filling in visual “noise,” establishing a palette, and reconfiguring the ground before introducing the vase and selecting the flowers. Suburban decorative codes and memories of his mother’s floral arrangement calendars are reframed through flattened pictorial space. His use of the pinhole lens softens detail and disperses focus, giving the images a kind of “Pop Pictorialism”: a synthesis of the flat affect of pop with the dreamy impressionistic intentions of the late 19th and 20th-century photography movement.
From Araki’s archive, the exhibition includes works from Flower Cemetery (2017)—cut flower bouquets arranged with plastic figurines like dinosaurs and action figures, and other uncanny objects—and Tokyo Nude (1989), which pairs female nudes with mundane views of the city. In both series, meaning emerges through juxtaposition: Tokyo’s backstreets—its “naked” face—are set against the naked female body, collapsing private and public experiences within a single work. In Flower Cemetery, the bouquets read less as still lifes than as psychological assemblages, animated by the residual charge of their embedded figures and disrupting any straightforward notion of beauty.
Pictured:
1) Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled (Flower Cemetery), 2017
2) Roe Ethridge, Hydrangeas, 1995/2026
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