Nan Goldin turns to marble and myth in new fine-art work

Nan Goldin stepped away from the flashbulb intimacy that made her name and into marble, myth and mortality, turning a lifetime of personal witness into something that feels newly canonical. For photographers who have spent decades building a recognizable style, her latest move showed that reinvention does not have to mean abandoning core obsessions.

Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong opened Sept. 12, 2024 at Gagosian in New York and marked Goldin’s first exhibition of new work since she joined the gallery in 2023. The show brought together two new moving-image works, presented in specially designed pavilions, and an extensive body of new photographs. Its images reached into classical sculpture and mythology, with references to Psyche, Diana, Narcissus, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hermaphrodite.

That shift mattered because Goldin did not simply swap subjects. She built the new project from photographs she had taken over roughly the last twenty years in the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Prado, then expanded the sequence through later iterations tied to the Galleria Borghese and the Gemäldegalerie. The result rephotographed masterpieces and placed them beside her own circle of friends, lovers and chosen family, a direct challenge to the old boundary between art-historical canon and lived experience.

Goldin’s earlier work makes the change even sharper. MoMA says The Ballad of Sexual Dependency grew out of 1970s and 1980s New York nightlife, first taking shape at the 1980 Times Square Show and eventually totaling around 700 candid color photographs. Her first slide show was shown at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the East Village’s Mudd Club in 1979, and her work later appeared in lofts, nightclubs and bars, breaking with conventional display hierarchies long before photography became a staple of the white cube.

Even as the materials changed, the themes stayed stubbornly Goldin. MoMA and Gagosian both frame her work around mortality, addiction and intimacy, from her activism around the AIDS crisis to her later engagement with the opioid crisis beginning in 2017. Goldin has also said she is “not so interested in photography anymore,” and that line now reads less like retreat than strategy. Her 2025-26 touring project This Will Not End Well, presented as her first exhibition dedicated to her work as a filmmaker, pushed that idea further with major stops at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. Goldin’s newest work showed the same force that made her famous, only now it was looking back through marble, myth and the long memory of art history.