Nan Goldin has had a lot on her plate as of late, travelling around the world to organise several exhibitions – including a major career retrospective – working with Laura Poitras on the Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and continuing her fight against the orchestrators of the US opioid crisis. As a result, her new artworks can be seen as a long-awaited return to her practice as a working artist, finally putting images to ideas that have been percolating in the intervening months and years.
Made up of two film works and a range of new photographs, these artworks come together to form a new show, You never did anything wrong, at Gagosian in New York. For fans of the artist, many of her foundational themes are present: love, relationships, beauty and loss, partly explored through intimate portraits of friends, family and lovers. At the same time, it represents a bit of a left-turn for Goldin, with the premiere of her first abstract work, You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024), and another piece, The Stendhal Syndrome (2024), staged in their own specially designed pavilions. Designed in collaboration with French-Lebanese architect Hala Wardé, these pavilions continue experimentations with architecture that began during the European tour of Goldin’s travelling retrospective, and each is designed to echo the work inside it.
As for the work itself, The Stendhal Syndrome features photos of classical, renaissance, and baroque masterpieces that Goldin has taken over the years – in the likes of the Louvre, the Met, and the Prado – juxtaposed with portraits of her own close friends and family, raising questions about art world hierarchies.
The moving image piece that gives the show its name, on the other hand, is described by Goldin as “a work for our times” and takes a total solar eclipse as its starting point. Filmed in the style of a home movie, using Super 8 and 16mm film, it places ambient nature sounds recorded during the natural phenomenon against mournful music by Mica Levi and Valerij Fedorenko, nodding to the ancient myth that eclipses are caused by animals stealing the sun.
Alongside both works, the exhibition walls are lined by a vast collection of photos in Goldin’s characteristic grid format. Many of these also place intimate, autobiographical scenes alongside canonical artworks, where shared colour palettes and mirrored gestures create an uncanny sense of symmetry across generations, or even millennia. Take a look at some of the highlights in the gallery above.
You never did anything wrong is on show at Gagosian New York until October 19, 2024.
