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Spark Art Fair Vienna 2021
Nan Goldin, born in Washington in 1953. After the suicide of her older sister in 1965, she moved in with foster parents in Lincoln. First black-and-white photographs and portraits of friends and acquaintances emerged. Photography as a visual diary manifested itself as her credo early on. Courses at the New England School of Photography and a workshop with Lisette Model deepened her interest in photography. From around 1974, she turned to colour photography and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she worked primarily with Cibachromes. After graduating, Goldin moved to New York in 1978. In addition to her first group exhibitions, she began to present her photographs in slideshows (backed by music from 1980). In her magnum opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), Nan Goldin provides unsparing insights into the lives of her friends as well as her own. The hundreds of slides were repeatedly rearranged and supplemented by Goldin. Cycles followed about her own self (All by Myself), about drag queens (The Other Side, A Double Life) and collaborations with Nobuyoshi Araki (Tokyo Love). Major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996 and a highly acclaimed exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2001. Nan Goldin lives and works in New York, Berlin and Paris.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
The Ballad of Sexual Dependence is Nan Goldin’s opus magnum, a contemporary vision of alienation and romance of her self-chosen family set in the photogenic misery of New York City's Lower East Side. From the mid-1970s to the 1980s, the artist literally lived with her camera and produced more than 800 images, originally presented as a slide show with altering soundtrack. The title of the series is borrowed from a play in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. In 1986, a selection of the images was published in book form - it became one of the most influential photo books of the 20th century.
The series shows honest, thereby often relentlessly intimate, sexual, sometimes violent episodes from Goldin's personal life and that of her friends - the artist with her lover in bed or shortly after being brutally beaten, her roommate Bobby masturbating, drag queens kissing in bars, a man suffering from AIDS. She documents a society marked by drug addiction, HIV and abuse, and yet empathy speaks from her authentic, raw images. The sensitive, tender gaze of the photographer, who records her social environment diaristicly, lends the images a remarkably lyrical aura.
James King: Supermodel
Goldin began accepting commissions for the fashion part of the New York Times Magazine in 1995. Her interest, however, was less in the aesthetics of the fashion ateliers and catwalks or the glamour of the industry; she was much more interested in the breaks in the perfectly polished surface, the intimate moments away from the spotlight. This is also the case in the series about 16-year-old supermodel Jamie King, called James, whom she accompanied to the fashion week in New York and Paris in 1995-96 together with author Jenny Egan. The photographs were published in the February 4, 1996, cover story James Is A Girl. The article and photographs provide insights into the life of a girl whose childhood is replaced by the glamorous yet fast-paced fashion world. Goldin's images capture King in intimate moments of joy as well as quiet contemplation. In the tradition of her Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she creates a private-seeming portrait of a teenager thrust into the limelight of the fashion industry.
