Nan Goldin — The Other Side — Librairie Marian Goodman — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 13 → July 25, 2020

Marian Goodman presents for the first time, an exhibition of photographs by Nan Goldin at the Paris bookshop. The black-and-white photographs in the show depict Goldin’s friends from the early 1970s. Her roommates, Ivy and Bea, and friends, Naomi and Colette, went to the club in Boston, the Other Side, every night. Over several years Goldin shared their lives, photographing them daily. These portraits not only marked Goldin’s first forays into photography, they helped to shape and became the inspiration for an artistic career that has spanned nearly fifty years.

Goldin recalls: “From my first night at The Other Side — the drag queen bar in Boston in the 70s — I came to life. I fell in love with one of the queens and within a few months moved in with Ivy and another friend. I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too. Completely devoted to my friends, they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were.”1

Nan Goldin, Roommate in her chair, Boston, 1972 Silver gelatin print
 — 17 7/8 × 12 1/8 in. (45.5 × 30.5 cm) © Nan Goldin — Courtesy the artist & Marian Goodman Gallery

In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City and continued in the following decades to photograph the LGBTQ+ communities, in Paris, Berlin, New York and Asia. Photographs documenting the daily lives of her friends and the club world from 1972 to 2010 are included in the acclaimed slideshow The Other Side (1994-2019), created by Goldin as a tribute to beauty, courage and freedom.

Nan Goldin, Best friends going out, Boston, 1973 
Silver gelatin print
 — 18 1/8 × 12 1/8 in. (46 cm × 30.5 cm) © Nan Goldin — Courtesy the artist & Marian Goodman Gallery

An expanded and updated version of the publication The Other Side (originally published in 1992) was released last year by Steidl, and will be available at the bookshop alongside a broad selection of books dedicated to Goldin’s photography. Nan Goldin lives and works between New York and Berlin. Her work has been the subject of numerous major exhibitions, and in particular of two retrospectives: one organized in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and another, in 2001, by the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Last year she was commissioned for the Château de Versailles exhibition Visible/Invisible a large site-specific photographic installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Sirens, Marian Goodman Gallery London, UK, 2019; The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2019; Fata Morgana, Château d’Hardelot, Condette, France, 2018; Weekend Plans, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, 2017; Nan Goldin, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, USA, 2017; The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 2016. In 2004, following a commission from the Festival d’Automne, Goldin presented for the first time, her major multimedia installation, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004), at La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, Paris. Nan Goldin has been the recipient of numerous awards including most recently the Ruth Baumgarte Award, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 2019 and The Centenary Medal, London, 2018. Goldin was awarded the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2007 and received into the French Legion of Honour in 2006.