Nan Goldin, You never did anything wrong @Gagosian

JTF (just the facts): A total of 27 photographic works, framed in black and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space and the entry area.

The photographic works included in the show are as follows:

  • 7 archival pigment prints (single image), 1998, 2002, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2024, sized roughly 41×61 inches (or the reverse), in editions of 3
  • 5 archival pigment prints (diptych), 2024, sized roughly 34×45, 24×65, 34×50, 41×60 inches, in editions of 3
  • 7 archival pigment prints (triptych), 2024, sized roughly 24×92, 24×96, 27×97, 34×66 inches, in editions of 3
  • 4 archival pigment prints (set of 4 images), 2024, sized roughly 34×86, 23×121, 50×65 inches, in editions of 3
  • 1 archival pigment print (set of 6 images), 2024, sized roughly 50×96 inches, in an edition of 3
  • 3 archival pigment prints, (set of 9 images), 2024, sized roughly 53×77, 53×78 inches, in editions of 3

The show also includes two video on works, on display in circular black viewing rooms in the center of the gallery space.

The video works included are as follows:

  • 1 single-channel video (color and sound), 2024, 17 minutes, in an edition of 5
  • 1 single-channel video (color and sound), 2024, 26 minutes 2 seconds, in an edition of 5

(Installation shots below. Photography was prohibited inside the video viewing rooms.)

Comments/Context: Once in a while, when walking through a museum, it’s often possible to have a moment of out-of-body time traveling. Looking at the figures in a religious painting or the standing form of an ancient sculpture from centuries past, we catch a fleeting and somewhat eerie glimpse of ourselves – that Renaissance woman or that interior scene from a 17th century Dutch master looks uncannily familiar, like we have somehow stepped back across the ages into our own story. It’s the kind of resonant artistic encounter that collapses time, making us feel like we are part of a human community that reaches back much farther than we ever could have imagined.

Community is one of the strongest threads that connects together the multi-decade artistic career of Nan Goldin. Her photographs have consistently documented her own community – herself, her friends, her lovers, her family, and her people broadly defined – and done so with remarkable, intimacy, frankness, sensitivity, and lyricism. This attention to community thrums through Goldin’s landmark slideshow “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (from the mid 1970s to mid 1980s, reviewed here), but that same interest and interior vantage point has generally informed much of her work. She’s seemingly always been ready to examine the rhythms of her own life, looking for those ordinary moments that become unexpectedly transcendent.

For the past decade or so, Goldin has immersed herself in the seductive process of looking, in particular in visits to museums around the world, where the artistic treasures housed there have risen up to meet her discerning gaze. Back in her 2011 gallery show (reviewed here), Goldin started to show some of the images she had made in these museums (mostly attentively cropped views of artworks, both famous and less known), blending them together with her own photographic archive and making visual pairings and links between the two. In the years since, she has continued down this path of teasing out connections between art and life, as seen in her 2021 gallery show (reviewed here) and now even more forcefully in this show.

As with the original “Ballad”, one of Goldin’s lesser acknowledged artistic skills is her ability to elegantly arrange and sequence her individual photographs into slideshows, videos, grids, and other image gatherings, creating additional layers of echo, association, and reconstituted narrative. The centerpiece of this show is a new video slideshow titled “The Stendahl Syndrome”, which is presented in an architecturally distinct all-black structure (with echoes of Richard Serra-like physicality and curvature) in the middle of the gallery space. The piece takes its name from a psychological condition (originally described by the 19th century French author), where one is overcome by beauty, generally in the form of artworks, leading to actual physical and emotional symptoms like fainting or a racing heart.

The video features a series of ancient myths and stories, retold by Goldin using the interleaved images from her museum discoveries and her archive, with a voiceover drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses read by the artist. One by one, she retells the stories of Pygmalion and Galatea, Cupid and Psyche, Narcissus, Diana, Hermaphrodite, and Orpheus and Eurydice, turning allegorical ideas into linked images and artistic impressions. The stories are filled with desire, love, grief, death, and loss, and Goldin’s photographs wrestle with these repeated themes, intimately connecting her own community back to art historical faces and gestures of centuries past.

In the format of a video slideshow, the images are shown one-at-a-time, cycling ever forward in a slow progression. But as framed photographic works hung on the gallery walls, Goldin has arranged the images into juxtaposed groups, ranging from pairings to grids of as many as nine images, with all of the images visible at the same time, which of course allows and encourages more back-and-forth formal comparison of her choices. Several of the most literal of these groups bring together images of hands, eyes, flowers, and the limp arms of death, but many more dig deeper into the specific myth making, with gatherings of images representing moments or characters in the ancient stories, as though a few frames from the video have been pulled out and re-presented.

In many of the strongest photographic works, Goldin tunnels into a character, using images from marble sculptures and paintings of that mythical figure in compositional dialogue with her own nudes and portraits. “Diana in the bath” creates a triptych of bending nudes, while “Echo with the blind flower girl of Pompeii” finds a connection in raised hands. “Death of Orpheus” pairs two outstretched male figures, Goldin’s sleeping man in jeans splayed out with the same fragility as the dying Orpheus. Still other works like “Young Love”, “Thora with the young hermaphrodite”, and “The rhythm of her arteries” notice the tender subtleties of parallel gestures and emotional states, where the past and present intermingle, like layers of musical harmony.

The show also includes a second video work “You never did anything wrong”, shown its own stand alone pavilion. This work is more open ended, but ultimately less engaging. Using an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun as a starting point, the video splices together various home movies, from scenes of the recent solar eclipse to snippets of various animals, including cats, dogs, birds, horses, bunnies, pigs, donkeys, and turtles, as well as gravestones at a rainy pet cemetery. The video reaches for a kind of romantic allegorical timelessness, especially in repeated images of eyes and seeing, but in the end, doesn’t quite deliver the same kind of ethereal refinement that “The Stendahl Syndrome” finds quite often.

Goldin has bounced around from gallery to gallery in the past decade or two, and this show marks her first show of new work at Gagosian since she joined the gallery stable in 2023. The muscular grandeur of this presentation seems to signal a subtle repositioning of Goldin, perhaps towards something bigger and more “profound” than the emotional closeness her work has generally delivered; to my eye, Goldin’s casually intimate aesthetic has always seemed to encourage the under appreciation of her often masterful control of expressive blur and sinuous color in the creation of mood and atmosphere. Those strengths appear here as well, in the shimmer of lilacs placed on the feet of a statue of Jesus and in the translucent yellow glow of light passing through the marble wings of Cupid, for example, but in general, it’s somewhat harder to employ those visual approaches when rephotographing artworks, which then leads to the more allegorical and meta-thinking that informs much of this new body of work.

Perhaps as Goldin ages (she’s now in her early 70s), her own personal losses have piled up and the community documented in her most famous images has disappeared, so much so that she is now in search of ways to extend her desire for connection back into the annals of art history as a substitute. In this way, her new works are like a comforting balm, in that they start to soothe the wounds and absences that so many of her earlier pictures document. By placing those photographs in new contexts that extend into myth, her community is in a sense renewed, the beauty she once saw (and continues to see) now anchored in a deeper framework of artistic time.

Collector’s POV: The photographic works in this show are priced at $55000 or $68000, based on size. Goldin’s photographs are routinely available in the secondary markets, with dozens of images available at auction every year; recent prices have generally ranged between $2000 and $120000.

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JTF (just the facts): Co-published in 2024 by TBW Books (here) and Éditions Images Vevey (here). Casebound hardcover with French fold dust jacket and printed edges, 9 x 11 inches, ... Read on.

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