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
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Shop Takeover
Nan Goldin
May 14–June 22, 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, Self-portrait with eyes turned inward, Boston, 1989 © Nan Goldin
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
Art Fair
ART SG 2024
January 19–21, 2024, booth BC06
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
artsg.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the second edition of ART SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Amoako Boafo, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Nan Goldin, Lauren Halsey, Hao Liang, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Donald Judd, Y.Z. Kami, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami & Virgil Abloh, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi. The works on view, which embrace a wide variety of subjects and approaches, find artists infusing traditional genres such as history painting, portraiture, and landscape with new and surprising ideas that traverse cultural and temporal boundaries.
Gagosian’s booth at ART SG 2024. Artwork, left to right: © ADAGP, Paris, 2024, © Jonas Wood, © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Museum Exhibitions
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
ICP at 50
From the Collection, 1845–2019
January 24–May 6, 2024
International Center of Photography, New York
www.icp.org
ICP at 50 is a thematic exploration of the many processes that comprise the history of the photographic medium, drawn from the International Center of Photography’s holdings. The institution was established in 1974 and the exhibition offers insight into the breadth and depth of its collection which spans from the nineteenth century to the present day. Work by Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, and Andy Warhol is included.
Installation view, ICP at 50: From the Collection, 1845–2019, International Center of Photography, New York, January 24–May 6, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Nan Goldin, © Zanele Muholi, © Deana Lawson. Photo: Jeenah Moon, courtesy International Center of Photography
Closed
Dix und die Gegenwart
September 30, 2023–April 1, 2024
Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany
www.deichtorhallen.de
This exhibition, whose title translates to Dix and the Present, explores the work of Otto Dix (1891–1969) and the artist’s enduring influence. It focuses on the ostensibly apolitical work Dix created beginning in 1933, which was less aggressive than his radical and provocative paintings of the 1920s. His Nazi-era landscapes, commissioned portraits, and Christian allegories were instead subtle and subversive forms of contemporary social critique. The exhibition aims to reveal the shifting cultural and social parameters in the reception of Dix’s art, while also demonstrating how his oeuvre continues to fascinate more than forty contemporary artists. Work by Georg Baselitz, Glenn Brown, John Currin, Nan Goldin, and Anselm Kiefer is included.
Glenn Brown, The Holy Bible, 2022 © Glenn Brown