Gagosian is pleased to announce Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong at 522 West 21st Street, New York. Opening on September 12th, the exhibition consists of two new moving-image works presented in specially designed pavilions and an extensive body of new photographs. This is Goldin’s first exhibition of new work since joining Gagosian in 2023.
© Nan Goldin Courtesy the artist and Gagosian – Nan Goldin in New York
Stendhal Syndrome (2024) is a moving-image work that juxtaposes photographs Goldin has taken over the last twenty years of Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces with portraits of her own friends, family, and lovers. Photographs of paintings and sculptures from museums around the world including the Galleria Borghese, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Prado flow seamlessly with images of Goldin’s community, crossing centuries to resonate in harmony with each other, revealing uncanny resemblances in composition, color, form, and emotional tone. Goldin’s ability to draw such precise visual connections raises profound questions about traditional hierarchies within art, and the enduring human compulsion to memorialize beauty in works fueled by love, and grief.
You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024) is a home movie centered around the totality of the solar eclipse, filmed in Super 8 and 16mm. The soundtrack includes a mournful piece by Valerij Fedorenko, a chilling new score composed by Mica Levi, and ambient sounds of nature recorded during the eclipse. It is Goldin’s first abstract work, born from an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun.
The moving-image works are projected within freestanding pavilions designed by Goldin in collaboration with Lebanese-French architect Hala Wardé. Each structure is conceived to echo the corresponding film therein, creating a Gesamtkunstwerk that fuses architecture, image, and sound.
Drawing from the same associative impulse that informed Stendhal Syndrome, Goldin created an expansive body of new grid photographs in which her own autobiographical images are mirrored by photographs taken in museums of artworks spanning millennia. The grid format, which has been a key element of Goldin’s work for three decades, echoes the cinematic structure of her moving-image works, encapsulating her understanding of history and time. These photographs line the walls of the gallery, surrounding the pavilions. Many of the grids explore stories of love and loss from antiquity, as in Orpheus Dying (2024), in which an 1866 Baroque painting by Émile Lévy of Orpheus is paired with a 1977 photograph of Goldin’s lover Tony. The visual parallels are striking, as both figures lie in nearly identical, seductive positions. Their pronounced rib cages create a haunting symmetry, and both bodies are draped against rumpled blue sheets that further unify the images, despite one being a classical nude and the other of a modern man wearing jeans. The shared palette and eerie shadowing of the two scenes blur the lines between past and present, high art and personal narrative, making their connection almost surreal—and evoking the pleasure and terror of the Stendhal Syndrome.
Throughout her storied fifty-year career, Goldin has fearlessly probed the depths of the human condition, capturing raw moments from everyday life that reveal universal experiences of love, loss, and the truths that connect us all.
NAN GOLDIN, You never did anything wrong September 12th–October 19th, 2024, Gagosian 522 West 21st Street
Opening reception: Thursday, September 12, 6–8pm
About the artist
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, DC, in 1953, and lives and works in New York. Her work is represented in major public and private collections worldwide.
A current retrospective focusing on Goldin’s moving-image work, This Will Not End Well, includes six slideshows and video installations displayed in unique pavilions designed in collaboration with architect Hala Wardé. Following its debut in 2022 at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the exhibition traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and will move on to Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; and Grand Palais, Paris, over the next two years. It will be accompanied by a nine-volume box set published by Steidl. Each volume comprises the content of a single slideshow. One volume, the reader, will contain texts by thirty writers that contextualize the artist’s work.
Other retrospectives include I’ll Be Your Mirror, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1996–98, traveled to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, 1997; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1997; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 1997; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1998; and Národní galerie Praha, Prague, 1998); and Le Feu Follet, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001, traveled as Devil’s Playground to Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2002; Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 2002; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, 2002–03; and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2003). Goldin was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture (2006), and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Award (2007), the Edward MacDowell Medal (2012), the Centenary Medal from London’s Royal Photographic Society (2018), and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize (2022).
