PHOTO:Nan Goldin- Blood on My Hands

The Nan Goldin Story is a familiar staple of the romantic mythology of urban bohemia. She is probably best known for “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, a collection of her photographs documenting her life and the lives of her friends, homosexuals and junkies, the poor and the marginalized in the New York of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Blood on My Hands” is the first public exhibition of Nan Goldin’s drawings, and it includes 4 new large-scale “grids” of multiple photographs composed in a single frame. Born in Washington in 1953 Nan Goldin spent her early childhood in a suburban middle-class home. She tells that even at eight she knew she wanted to escape. “I was very influenced by my older sister (Barbara), who hated suburbia passionately”. Barbara was 18 and Nan 11, when her sister killed herself by lying down in front of a train. Three years later Nan ran away from home, living in a commune and spending most of her time at the cinema. Goldin has kept a diary since childhood, often filling the pages with drawings. Recently those drawings have taken on a new life as independent works. Emerging from her regular practice of daily reflection, they share the charged emotional atmosphere of her photographs, but their symbolic imagery, handwritten texts, and complex surfaces, made with a variety of mediums, introduce an expressive element that is new to her work. The photographs for her grids are selected according to formal or psychological themes. For the new grids, the unifying element is color: pink, blue, gold, or black. Each color unites moments she has captured in different countries across the decades. The grid format, which she has been working with for over 20 years, emerged from the same associative impulse as her slide shows.

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24 Street, New York, Duration: 5/11-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.matthewmarks.com