Great artist

A “great artist.” When a painter, photographer or sculptor is associated with this label, it’s because they gained recognition by inventing their own universe. The American artist Nan Goldin (born in 1953) belongs to this exclusive circle of unusual creators. By narrating her life through photography, she developed a new aesthetic made of snapshots taken on the fly.

Often poorly lit, poorly framed, yet always capturing spontaneous moments of authenticity, her photographs tell the story of a disenchanted youth—to which she herself belonged—that was nevertheless taken with an insatiable desire for life and love in all its forms. Homosexuality, drag queens, drugs and what is commonly referred to as “the AIDS years,” marked by the pain of illness and loss, are central to her world.

New aesthetic

By the mid-1980s, she had transformed what might once have been called photographic failures into masterpieces. She paired this new aesthetic with a powerful sense of melancholy. She amplified this effect by creating “slide shows,” large-scale projections of her images set to music that magnified the evocative power of her photos. By 1996, she was already the subject of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Yvon Lambert

French audiences were introduced to her work by gallerist Yvon Lambert in the early 1990s, followed by an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2001.

Versailles in 2019

But since then, and though she is now enshrined in the pantheon of contemporary artists, Nan Goldin’s creative output has clearly lost steam. In 2019, she participated in an exhibition at the Château de Versailles, “Visible/Invisible” where she photographed hydraulic circuits of the palace and female statues in its gardens, but to trivial effect.

Opioid crisis

More recently, she returned to the spotlight not as an artist but as a political activist, successfully campaigning against the opioid crisis and the Sackler family, whose lucrative business fueled addiction. This battle was highlighted in the widely acclaimed 2023 documentary about her, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by Laura Poitras.

This Will Not End Well

Now, Nan Goldin’s current project is the European tour of her retrospective titled “This Will Not End Well” which takes a unique form. Through April 6, 2025, it is being shown in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie, following stops in Stockholm and Amsterdam, and before heading to Milan and Paris in 2026. The exhibition consists exclusively of five slide shows set to music, drawing from her body of work.

Hala Wardé

Each presentation is housed in a fabric pavilion brilliantly designed by the architect Hala Wardé, who created a kind of village where each of the five spaces offers a distinct showcase. The highlight of the exhibition is “Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls,” a project initiated in 2004 which stages a theater-like space to recount the story of her sister Barbara’s descent into hell.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Since Nan Goldin’s groundbreaking first slide show, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” causing a sensation in 1981, Apple has had the time to invent the “Memories” function on their iPhone which similarly sets slide shows of your personal photographs to music. Such technological innovations have somewhat diluted the impact of Goldin’s work; as does the fact that a number of her images are repeated from one pavilion to the next.

Fire Leap

Finally, more recent series like “Fire Leap”—begun in 2010, the series depicts the world of children and is set to childlike music—signal that the artist’s inspiration is waning. The succession of cute images stands in stark contrast to her most striking verve.

But we will hold on to her past work. Because she now belongs to the class of the “great artist.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                               Note: Nan Goldin prohibited photography and video recordings within her exhibition spaces, hence the scarcity of visual documentation.