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18/11/2010

Nan Goldin

Berlinische Galerie, Berlin

Nan Goldin (*1953 in Washington, D.C.) begann photographs as a teenager. She left home when she was 14 and was soon attending the alternative Satya Community School, where she became obsessed with preserving her life in pictures. Goldin’s themes, then as now, are drawn from her immediate environment – her relationships and the circle of friends she has always called her “family”. In Boston, she observed and recorded the night life of drag queens in the bar “The Other Side” from 1972, later – in 1974 – enrolling to study Photography. In 1978 she moved to New York, devoting herself primarily to depicting the day-to-day lives of her friends in a bohemian milieu of film-makers, artists and musicians. Her first major slide show, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, was a great success, sparking worldwide interest in her work and largely establishing her continuing place in the history of photography. By presenting her images as a narrative sequence of slides, Nan Goldin was both exploring an affinity between photography and cinema and creating an entirely new form of subjective expression by concentrating on deeply personal extracts from her own life.

The exhibition Nan Goldin – Berlin Work is the first opportunity to see a large number of well-known, but also previously unpublished works by this American artist, produced since the 1980s during her numerous visits to Berlin.

Portraits

As Nan Goldin lives so unconditionally from human contact, she seems ideally placed to work as a portrait photographer. Her portraits show spontaneous moments of everyday life and the emotional moods of friends, and their titles reveal her intimate, familiar relationships with those she portrays. In formal terms too, these pictures occupy a special place in her artistic output, for they emanate a formal composure – a result of concentrating on an individual – which permits a personal view of the protagonist.

Goldin’s circle of friends in Berlin has evolved since her earliest visits from 1982 onwards, when she met the band “Die Tödliche Doris” and also Alf Bold, who invited her to show “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in the Arsenal Cinema in 1984. The circle grew particularly in 1991, while she stayed in the city on a DAAD bursary.

Self-portraits

Nan Goldin has always been a subject of her own photography. Like so many artistic self-portraits, hers are usually created in situations of conflict when life has either undergone a sudden twist or reached a low point. Whether she turns her bruised face to the camera or, after arriving in Berlin, watches herself critically in the bathroom mirror, these images often appear to be drawing on traditional typologies of self-characterisation, be it exemplary suffering or the contemplative, introspective artist. But on closer examination, Goldin resists any such typology: she does not set herself up either as a victim or as an anxious newcomer. Rather, she personifies an unwavering assertiveness, underscored by the firm gaze into the camera and the fresh red lipstick.

Interiors

Apparently unoccupied or unused rooms seem at first glance to be foreign bodies in Nan Goldin’s œuvre.
On closer scrutiny, however, the cheap, kitschy pomp of these abandoned interiors, with their satin curtains, plastic flowers and gilt cherubs in corners, fit well with the artist’s distinct fondness for glamour and flamboyance, displayed in so many details in the portraits and snapshots. For Nan Goldin, these spaces, already integrated in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” as metaphors of emotional failure, echo existential feelings such as loss, yearning and loneliness.

Nudes

Goldin’s nudes do not draw on classical views of nude photography, for they are not prompted by a desire to highlight a naked body with the help of a choreographed pose. Rather, these are pictures of people whose nakedness is contextual, because they are taking a bath or have just had sex. In this combination, on the other hand, the frequent theme of the female body by or in water is either a metaphorical reference to ritual processes such as cleansing or birth or else a sensual composition, derived from the interplay of light and the (female) body. The nude as a revealing image of the subject can also be seen as a key to Goldin’s artistic intentions: the use of photography as a medium to uncover the deep, true feelings of the person portrayed.

Snapshots

“My work does come from the snapshot,” said Nan Goldin in 1996 in an interview with Walter Keller and David Armstrong, placing her photography then in a spontaneous context. For Goldin, this form of photography sprang from a love of what it depicts and enabled the preservation of memories – of people, places and moments. By describing her pictures as snapshots, she was also making it quite clear that there is nothing stage-managed about her photography. Ultimately, Goldin acknowledged, depicting reality implies chance and risk. The uniqueness of Goldin’s photographs is based on a sense of sensibility and compassion, which allows each work to become a moment of closeness between the model and the photographer.

The exhibition is being supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfond (Capital Cultural Fund).

Image: Nan Goldin, Bea with the blue drink, O-Bar, West-Berlin, 1984, Cibachrome, 76 x 102 cm, © Nan Goldin / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Press contact:
Ulrike Andres - Marketing and Communication Tel. +49 (0)30 78902829 Fax.+49 (0)30 78902730 andres@berlinischegalerie.de

Press conference: 19 November, 11 am
Opening: 19 November, 7 pm

Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur
Alte Jakobstrasse 124-128, Berlin
Opening times: Mi-Mo 10-18 h
free admission

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