About
The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.
—Nan Goldin
Emerging from the artist’s own life and relationships, and including herself as a subject, Nan Goldin’s work has transformed the role of photography in contemporary art. Her photographs and moving-image works address essential themes of identity, love, sexuality, addiction, and mortality. Uniting art and activism, Goldin has confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s and today brings international attention to the overdose crisis.
Born in Washington, DC, in 1953, Goldin grew up outside of Boston. She left home at age fourteen, and at sixteen enrolled in the Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where she acquired her first camera. Goldin’s early black-and-white photographs, which convey the beauty, vulnerability, and joy of her friends in Boston’s transgender community, were initially shown in her first solo exhibition in 1973 at Project, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts. Attending Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts beginning in 1974, she would start working principally with Cibachrome prints and 35mm slides, taking photographs in saturated color.
Relocating to New York in 1978, Goldin began documenting members of her chosen family in a milieu of New Wave clubs, No Wave cinema, and post-Stonewall gay culture. Capturing moments of revelry and friendship, intimacy and loss, she titled this body of work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency after a song from The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Constantly evolving, it grew into a multimedia presentation of almost seven hundred slides accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack. Initially projected in nightclubs, it was included in The Times Square Show in 1980, the Whitney Biennial in 1985, and countless other museum exhibitions around the world. It was published by Aperture in 1986 as the first of Goldin’s many books and was recently reprinted for the twenty-first time.
#NanGoldin
Nan Goldin: Sisters, Saints, Sibyls
Michael Cary explores the history behind, and power within, Nan Goldin’s video triptych Sisters, Saints, Sibyls. The work will be on view at the former Welsh chapel at 83 Charing Cross Road, London, as part of Gagosian Open, from May 30 to June 23, 2024.
Nan Goldin: Scopophilia
In 2010, Nan Goldin was given private access to the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Derek Blasberg talks about how that experience, paired with her reluctance to embrace digital advances in photography, created one of Gagosian Rome’s most popular shows.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Visit
London Gallery Weekend 2024
Nan Goldin
May 31–June 2, 2024
Various locations in London
londongalleryweekend.art
As part of London Gallery Weekend, Gagosian will have extended hours at its London locations. Visitors can see Nan Goldin’s film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, the second presentation of Gagosian Open, at 83 Charing Cross Road, as well as an exhibition of select early black-and-white photographs by the artist at Gagosian, Burlington Arcade.
Additionally, Goldin’s Gagosian Shop takeover is open, featuring a reading room of books she has chosen, publications on her work, and a display of in-progress layouts from Heartbeat, a forthcoming nine-volume catalogue raisonné published by Steidl. In its fourth year, London Gallery Weekend is a free annual event featuring over 150 of the city’s leading contemporary art galleries coming together to celebrate culture and creativity.
Nan Goldin, Marlene as a showgirl on stage with Sylvia Sidney, The Other Side, Boston, 1973 © Nan Goldin
Shop Takeover
Nan Goldin
May 14–July 20, 2024
Gagosian Shop, London
Nan Goldin is taking over the Gagosian Shop in London’s Burlington Arcade, offering visitors an opportunity to explore her practice in depth. The basement floor will be transformed into a reading room of books chosen by Goldin, with publications on artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Larry Clark, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz, and fiction, essays, and memoirs by writers including Toni Morrison, Darryl Pinckney, Lucy Sante, and Sarah Schulman. A wide selection of publications on Goldin are available on the ground floor, including both new and out-of-print exhibition catalogues, monographs, and artist’s books. Also on display are in-progress layouts from Heartbeat, a forthcoming nine-volume catalogue raisonné of Goldin’s photographs published by Steidl. Over the course of the takeover, different pages from this comprehensive publication project will be displayed, revealing Goldin’s notes and markups over the course of its development.
The Shop takeover accompanies an exhibition of Goldin’s early works in the gallery upstairs and Nan Goldin: Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, the second presentation in the Gagosian Open series of off-site exhibitions, on view at 83 Charing Cross Road from May 30 to June 23, 2024.
Nan Goldin takeover at the Gagosian Shop, London, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
Support
Art for a Safe and Healthy California
Presented by Jane Fonda, Gagosian, and Christie’s
Art for a Safe and Healthy California is a benefit exhibition and auction presented by Jane Fonda, Gagosian, and Christie’s to support Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California. Artworks donated by artists including Charles Gaines, Frank Gehry, Alex Israel, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles, Ed Ruscha, Jonas Wood, among others, will be sold to help the coalition of voters campaigning to stop oil companies attempting to repeal Governor Gavin Newsom’s SB1137 on the November ballot. The bill provides safe setbacks from oil wells for homes, parks, schools, and playgrounds, as well as requirements to make already pumping wells safer.
The benefit launches on April 9 with a ticketed fundraiser in Beverly Hills hosted by Jane Fonda, Larry Gagosian, Aileen Getty, and Susan and Mark Buell, with cohosts Edythe Broad, Frank Gehry, Wendy and Eric Schmidt, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, and Sean Penn. Highlighted artworks will be on view. A selection of works will be auctioned in the Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale during their marquee sale week in May, while another group of works will be presented for sale in an exhibition in summer 2024 at the Beverly Hills gallery.
Ed Ruscha, UPS DOWNS, 2023 © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Brica Wilcox
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Fragile Beauty
Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection
Through January 5, 2025
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
www.vam.ac.uk
Showcasing over three hundred rare prints from 140 photographers, Fragile Beauty is a major presentation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography, on loan from the private collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish. Selected from over seven thousand images, the photographs—many of which are on public display for the first time—are era-defining images that explore both the strength and vulnerability inherent to the human condition. Work by Nan Goldin and Sally Mann is included.
Nan Goldin, Nicolas, Clemens and Jens laughing at Le Pulp, Paris, 1999 © Nan Goldin
Opening Soon
Nan Goldin
This Will Not End Well
Opening October 2024
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
www.smb.museum
This retrospective explores Nan Goldin’s photographic practice within the context of filmmaking. Over the years, she has created more than a dozen moving-image works composed of thousands of images, ranging from portraits of her friends to traumatic family stories about addiction and domestic violence. Embracing the artist’s original vision of how her work is to be experienced, the exhibition—presented in six unique buildings designed by architect Hala Wardé— focuses on Goldin’s slideshows and video installations set to sound and music. This exhibition originated at Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Nan Goldin, Christmas at The Other Side, Boston, 1972 © Nan Goldin
Opening Soon
Nan Goldin
This Will Not End Well
October 5, 2025–February 15, 2026
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
pirellihangarbicocca.org
This retrospective explores Nan Goldin’s photographic practice within the context of filmmaking. Over the years, she has created more than a dozen moving-image works composed of thousands of images, ranging from portraits of her friends to traumatic family stories about addiction and domestic violence. Embracing the artist’s original vision of how her work is to be experienced, the exhibition—presented in six unique buildings designed by architect Hala Wardé—focuses on Goldin’s slideshows and video installations set to sound and music. This exhibition has traveled from Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Nan Goldin, My horse, Roma, Valley of the Queens, Luxor, Egypt, 2003 © Nan Goldin
Closed
Lacan, L’exposition
Quand l’art rencontre la psychanalyse
December 31, 2023–May 27, 2024
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
www.centrepompidou-metz.fr
This exhibition, whose title translates to Lacan, the Exhibition: When Art Meets Psychoanalysis, is the first museum presentation dedicated to the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. Closely involved with twentieth-century art and artists, Lacan intrigued and provoked—interpreting artworks not just as something to see, but as objects that look back at the viewer. The multipart exhibition invites visitors on an intellectual journey through artworks that engage with Lacanian concepts such as “the mirror stage,” “lalangue,” and “jouissance.” Work by Maurizio Cattelan, Alberto Giacometti, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Anselm Kiefer, Pablo Picasso, Tatiana Trouvé, and Andy Warhol is included.
Tatiana Trouvé, Priapus, 2010 © Tatiana Trouvé. Photo: Thomas Lannes