Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Italy, is dedicating its first major exhibition to the work of Nan Goldin (b. 1953, Washington, D.C.), as a filmmaker and multimedia artist. The show is curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi and will be on display until February 15, 2026.
Nan Goldin, portrait. Photo: Thea Traff.
The concept came from a collaboration between the artist and Fredrik Liew, chief curator at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, where the show debuted in 2022. It traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2023) and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2024). After Milan it will continue at Grand Palais Rmn in Paris (2026). The internationally acclaimed American artist presents the public with the full force of her work: a far-reaching narrative rooted in her life, her friends, and the places she has lived, and set though the world of “diversity”. Removed from any notion of photography as social inquiry or conceptual experimentation tool, Goldin has always been drawn to the intimate diary form; an exploration akin to a family album no longer hidden in a drawer. “I don't choose people to photograph; I take photos straight from my life. These photos come from relationships, not observation” she states, affirming her approach to exploration. This strategy is never conducted from the outside, but rather undertaken in the first person as the result of direct engagement. The outcomes are both striking and compelling. To fully understand Goldin’s work, however, we must take a step back and outline the climate of the 1980s, when her poetics developed. The change in attitude toward photography that emerged at the beginning of the decade stemmed from an evolution in how images and their aesthetic identity were conceived and the growing presence of female artists in the international art scene. The revival of themes related to the body and sexuality that characterized the period found fertile ground inGoldin’s research, which featured a high degree of personalization and the substantial abolition of the private sphere.
The emotional essence of everyday life
Goldin was raised in the suburbs of Boston in a Jewish family with four children. She was the youngest. At sixteen, she bought her first camera and started experimenting with black-and-white film. She was an avid cinephile and was captivated by Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and Hollywood divas. She was also influenced by European films, such as those by Michelangelo Antonioni, Robbe-Grillet, and Jacques Rivette, as well as the films of Andy Warhol.
The Other Side, 1992–2021. Nan Goldin, Fashion show at Second Tip, Toon, C, So and Yogo, Bangkok, 1992 © Nan Goldin. Courtesy Gagosian
After finishing her studies at Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in the early 1970s, she moved to Boston with a group of drag queens and began narrating their lives through images. Around this time, she decided to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where she studied the history of photography. She then moved to the queer community of Provincetown. Without access to a darkroom for printing, she began considering slides as a means of displaying her work, an approach that would soon become her preferred method. Starting in 1978, in the chaotic and fervent laboratory that was New York City, she documented the lives of her friends and lovers at clubs, underground cinemas, and in her Bowery apartment. She was interested in the emotional essence of everyday life and the souls of people, which the medium allowed her to access as if it were an invisible extension of the empathy felt by herself. If we had to attribute a function to Goldin’s photography, it would be maieutic because, like a midwife, it encourages viewers of her stories of identity, intimacy, marginality, violence, love, and loss to give birth to feelings of awareness and knowledge of the human condition. Her work is a mirror image of the real world, which is dominated by both beauty and enchantment and pain and terror. It is a world in which humans are immersed with no escape.
“The diary I let people read”
Drawing from her personal experiences and relationships, she began working on her first major slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022). This collection comprises nearly 700 portraits and an eclectic soundtrack that capture moments of life in New York, Provincetown, Berlin, and London from the 1970s to the 1990s. “Some of the music is obscure; my friends gave me music, and I collected music from around the world. Wherever I went to do the slideshow, people would turn me on to another piece of music.” The work is continuously updated and re-edited, so it is constantly changing.
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981-2022, Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025 © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
It has never been exhibited in the same version, which gives new impetus to Goldin’s candid yet delicate perspective on relationships, intimacy, parties, bedrooms, and bars. This seminal work of the artist (included in the groundbreaking 1980 Times Square show in New York) is contained within one of several architectural structures, defined as pavilions, and designed by architect Hala Wardé, that characterize the exhibition. Together, they form a sort of village. Each stop of the metaphorical journey they suggest, corresponds to one of Goldin’s works, including Memory Lost (2019–21). Goldin herself considers that her most important work after The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The narrative revolves around substance addiction and withdrawal and how these experiences can alter memory. The use of blurred, damaged, or technically imperfect photographs taken from deleted scenes serves to convey the distortion of memories. These images, in their rawness, can be deeply lyrical. The artist’s community of friends—her big family—was affected by many deaths from overdose or AIDS. This led her to found the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which is dedicated to curbing the phenomenon of prescription opioid abuse. This has skyrocketed in America since the late 1980s due to unscrupulous marketing.
