PHOTO: Nan Goldin-You never did anything wrong

Emerging from the her 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Nan Goldin’s solo exhibition “You never did anything wrong” exhibition consists of two new moving-image works presented in specially designed pavilions and an extensive body of new photographs. “Stendhal Syndrome” (2024) is a moving-image work, with a score composed by Soundwalk Collective, 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.

Photo: Nan Goldin, Orpheus Dying, 2024. Archival pigment print, 24 × 64 ¾ inches (60.8 × 164.5 cm), edition of 3 + 2 AP, © Nan Goldin, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/9-19/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/