First part

A new solo show of photographs by Nan Goldin will open at 7 p.m. on Thursday 2 July 2015 at the Guido Costa Projects Gallery.

This exhibition showcases the long professional relationship between the artist and the gallery; a relationship that has included several exhibition projects, publications and life experiences both in Italy and other parts of the world. Such an important and intense relationship deserves a rather special exhibition that brings together absolutely unique and previously unseen works of great historical and documentary importance.
The exhibition marks the beginning of a complex and ambitious project dedicated to Nan Goldin, which will include a series of exhibitions whose aim is to cast a spotlight on some of the most secret and intimate aspects of the artist’s personal creative history.
Drawn from her New York archive, the works on show date back to her Bostonian years (1970-1974) and represent a turning point in the artist’s personal and creative development. The buck ‘starts’ here, when, little more than a teenager, Nan Goldin took her first steps into the art world. The photographs document the decade which would be coined as the ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’. Characterized by what is clearly a genuine creative force, the striking element in this work is the ease of execution coupled with a real passion and rare and powerful urgency in the shots. Unsurprisingly, this decade would turn a shy, middle-class provincial American girl into, arguably, one of the most radical and innovative artistic voices on the international scene.
The exhibition in Turin comprises fifty photographs taken from 1970 to 1974, and allows us a privileged glimpse behind the scenes of her early series of work, some of which went on to be published in ‘The Other Side’ and ‘A Double Life’ in the Nineties - the latter produced in collaboration with her lifelong friend David Armstrong. The mostly small-format black and white, and colour photographs seen here were developed as limited editions by the artist, who sometimes even produced only a single copy from the negative.
In the late Nineties a few exemplary shots were taken from this corpus, which numbers a few dozen, and made into medium-sized editions of eighteen. Apart from these few photographs (some of which became well known), the rest of the material has remained unpublished until today, with the exception of the shots contained in Dazzle Bag, exhibited as part of her first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1996, and the images included in the slide show ‘The Other Side’, produced at the same time.
The gallery has chosen to present only those pieces that have a special place in the entire history of the artist’s output: from her tentative experiments with colour; her early attempts to introduce narrative coherence to apparently chance snapshots, until the subtle traces of theoretical and political awareness begin gradually to creep into her work. In short, we wanted to bring out the best of the original Nan Goldin - the brilliant newcomer - long before her years in New York, Times Square, the Mudd Club and her dazzling appearance in many of the most important galleries and museums around the world.
We are therefore proud to be able to bring these extraordinary private documents to the public eye, safe in the knowledge that they represent a significant milestone in the history of art and photography from the last few decades.

Second part

On Monday 21 September, 2015, the second part of the solo show of work by the American artist Nan Goldin opens at the Guido Costa Gallery in via Mazzini 24, Torino.

The current exhibition dialogues with and concludes the previous show of work by the same artist that opened in the gallery on July 2 this year, dedicated to her early black and white photographs taken in Boston between 1970 and 1974.
Its follow-up concentrates on more recent work produced from 2014 to the present, produced using a technique for which she is not known at all - drawing.
Although Nan Goldin has been drawing consistently for some years, she has always considered the results very private, and they have rarely been seen outside the circle of her closest friends or outside her studio. We are therefore extremely proud to be able to offer to the public a part of the artist’s oeuvre never shown together before.
The exhibition brings together 28 drawings produced using different techniques on different weights and sizes of paper, each different from the other. Nan Goldin’s drawings are the result of a blend of extreme freedom and bold compositional and chromatic design; the act of drawing serving as a kind of drug for the soul secretly and constantly conversing with her photography, which in many respects it exalts and brings to a conclusion.
The more quickly executed drawings could almost be diary entries sketched with a pen, brush or felt pen; others are more carefully meditated, charged with repentance and conveyed using techniques rather new to her. While unhampered by experience or the academy, each one does however seem to thrive on its own clear sensibility, strong identity and her hand.
Governed by a sort of automatic writing, the themes and subjects of the drawings vary from diary-like commentary to self-portraiture, as well as spreading into a dreamlike dimension capable of conjuring up ghosts and obsessions.
Choosing the work to be included in this small body of drawings was particularly hard, as the aim was that of creating a selection of work from, as we have said, a rather large volume (it is her custom to draw every day) that could condense recurring expressive means she has gradually made her own; spotlight a piece that gave rise to small cycles of work, or was sparked by a meeting, by a trip, or by a particular state of mind.
For some years now, drawing has become an extremely important contemplative exercise for Nan Goldin that occupies her days (or better, nights); she perseveres with marked discretion and a certain understandable reluctance, with regard to judgement by others, to the point that the decision to present this work to the public neither an easy or automatic one. It is therefore with great pleasure but also great care and respect that we have embarked together on this exploration into a fragile and unexplored universe, albeit vibrant with energy and focused determination.
Her drawings should in no way be considered a solipsistic and educated parenthesis: they is part of her natural urge to tell and share.

The exhibition is open to the public from 3 – 7 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays until 24 October 2015.