NEW YORK, NY.- Matthew Marks announces Nan Goldin: Blood on My Hands, an exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. It is the first public exhibition of Goldins drawings, and it includes four new large-scale grids of multiple photographs composed in a single frame.
Goldin has kept a diary since childhood, often filling the pages with drawings. Recently those drawings have taken on a new life as independent works of art. Emerging from her regular practice of daily reflection, they share the charged emotional atmosphere of her photographs, but their symbolic imagery, handwritten texts, and complex surfaces, made with a variety of mediums, introduce an expressive element that is new to her work.
Goldin selects the photographs for her grids according to formal or psychological themes. For the new grids, the unifying element is color: pink, blue, gold, or black. Each color unites moments she has captured in different countries across the decades. The grid format, which she has been working with for over twenty years, emerged from the same associative impulse as her slide shows. As Elisabeth Sussman has written, The grid, an echo of the slide show, sums up her view that history and time exist as an aggregate of individual lives.
Nan Goldins work has been the subject of two major touring museum retrospectives, one organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (1996) and the other by the Centre Georges Pompidou (2001). Her awards include the French Legion of Honor (2006), the Hasselblad Award (2007), and the Edward MacDowell Medal (2012). An exhibition of Goldins work, including The Ballad of Sexual Dependency presented in its original 35mm slide format, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through February 12.
This is Goldins tenth one-person exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery since 1995.
Nan Goldin: Blood on My Hands is on view at 523 West 24th Street until December 23, 2016.