Nan Goldin
dal 17/11/2007 al 9/2/2008
Segnalato da
17/11/2007
Nan Goldin
Museum of Fine Arts MFAH, Houston
Stories Retold. The exhibition frames Goldin's career with two room-size installations: an updated and unique version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her magnum opus, and Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls, which tells the story of 3 women, inspired by the life and suicide of the artist's older sister, Barbara. Also featured in the exhibition will be an important series of unique grids created over the past 7 years. Employing light, color, and intimate framing of performance and film, Goldin broke down traditional barriers between photography, cinema, and installation art.
Nan Goldin: Stories Retold frames Goldin´s career with two room-size installations: an updated and unique version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980-2006/2007), Goldin´s magnum opus, and Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls (2004), which tells the story of three women, inspired by the life and suicide of the artist´s older sister, Barbara. Also featured in the exhibition will be an important series of unique grids created over the past seven years, Goldin´s monumental Tokyo Spring Fever grid (1994-95), and iconic individual images from across the artist´s career.
Since the early 1970s, Nan Goldin has created a vast body of work evolved from the informality and directness of snapshots. Employing light, color, and intimate framing of performance and film, Goldin broke down traditional barriers between photography, cinema, and installation art. Goldin´s radical Ballad of Sexual Dependency (initially realized between the years 1980-86) was first seen in New York´s downtown alternative spaces as a home movie, with Goldin running the projector and many of its subjects in the audience. The version of Ballad presented in Nan Goldin: Stories Retold is itself a retelling of the original Ballad. Goldin extends her narrative to embrace new images, while remaining true to her original storyline.
The passion of Ballad is matched by Goldin´s brilliant Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls. Using the latest advances in film, video, and sound technology, Goldin weaves together three stories across three screens: the martyrdom of the early Christian Saint Barbara; the desperate life of her sister Barbara against the backdrop of the Goldin family´s middle-class home life in Maryland; and Goldin´s own painful exploration of her life, addiction, and recovery. Accompanied by Goldin´s plainspoken narration, Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls traces a complex family history that travels from innocence to chaos, betrayal and in the end, redemption. Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls was purchased jointly in spring 2007 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The essentially linear narratives of Ballad and Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls are complemented in the exhibition by Goldin´s remarkable grid compositions that offer a different approach to storytelling. Goldin uses the grid format to link together images that range across time and space, creating scenarios that are full of incident and narrative fragments. Among the grids of view will be the MFAH´s Tokyo Spring Fever and recent grid compositions of extraordinary intimacy as Goldin focuses on close friends and family across several generations. Many of these photographs will be seen for the first time in Houston.
About the artist: Nan Goldin began photographing at the age of 15 and she began to exhibit her work in the early 1970s. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, in 1977. She moved to New York in 1978 where she continued to document her "extended family". These photographs became the subject of her slide shows and Goldin´s first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. It was groundbreaking work, as she was the first woman to use photography to present the intimate details of her personal life as a public work of art, and inspired a new generation of artists.
In 1985 her work was included in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she gained international renown. In 1991 she moved to Berlin, Germany on a DAAD grant, and she continued to live there until 1994. She has participated in many artistic collaborations, including the books Tokyo Love with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and A Double Life with her old friend David Armstrong (both published in 1994). In 1996, a major retrospective exhibition of her work, I´ll be Your Mirror, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and toured to museums in Europe. In 2000 she moved to Paris. Today she works and lives both in Paris and New York.
The awards and fellowships Goldin has received include: 1979 The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz; 1986 Engelhard Award, Boston; 1987 Kodak Photobuchpreis, Stuttgart; 1991 DAAD Artists-in-Residence program, Berlin; 1994 Brandeis Award in Photography; 2004 Medal of the city of Paris; 2006 Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Paris. In November 2007 she was received the Hasselblad Award, photography´s highest honor.
Related Events:
Members Daytime Preview
At the Caroline Wiess Law Building
November 17, 2007 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Patron-Plus Members Preview
At the Caroline Wiess Law Building
November 16, 2007 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Museum of Fine Arts
1001 Bissonnet Street - Houston