NAN GOLDIN
Gagosian presents an exhibition by Nan Goldin at its gallery in London’s Burlington Arcade. Among Goldin’s earliest work, these photographs date from 1972 to 1974 and inspired the direction of her work for the subsequent fifty years.
May 14 - June 22, 2024
he black-and-white images commemorate Goldin’s closest friends, members of Boston’s transgender community. Goldin depicted them in a shared apartment and at one of her favorite places, The Other Side, the city’s most prominent drag club and one of the only queer spaces that existed in Boston at the time.
Conveying the beauty, glamour, vulnerability, and joy of her chosen family, the photographs document what she terms “gender euphoria.” As Goldin has explained, “I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were.”
The exhibition at Burlington Arcade is open concurrently with 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. Goldin is also taking over the Gagosian Shop, with a reading room of books chosen by the artist on the basement level and a wide selection of publications on her work for sale on the ground floor.
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.
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.