MADRID, SPAIN.- The Velázquez Palace at the Retiro of Madrid presents "Nan Goldin". Nan Goldin is the impassioned historian of love in an age of fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, violence and death. Recognised as one of the world’s most compelling photographers, her work has had a lasting impact on film, design and fashion as well as the fine arts. Goldin is best known for her photographs of people living marginal lifestyles, taken in cosmopolitan centres such as New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris. Working directly from personal experience, she captures moments that cumulatively tell stories of friendship, desire and their aftermath. Her work traverses the spectrum of human relations from love to isolation, betrayal, loss and self-revelation. Emotionally charged, and shot in intensely saturated hues, these images provide a slice of contemporary history, recounted through the lives of those close to her and characterised by an unposed and private take on her subjects.



A prolific photographer, Goldin edits her images into differing narrative sequences that focus both on the individual and on wider thematic issues. The ’Boston Years’ is a sequence of early photographs taken between 1969 and 1974. The first black and white snapshots capture Goldin and her friends in glamorous poses and heavy make-up, reinventing themselves as icons of sexual fantasy. In the early 70s Goldin lived with two drag queens, turning her camera to their public, on-stage personas as well as more intimate moments in their domestic surroundings. Heavily influenced by the shimmer of disappearing elegance in old Hollywood movies, European films and fashion photography, these images remain in both style and content at the heart of Goldin’s later practice.