Gagosian, arguably the world’s largest and most prominent gallery, today announced global representation Nan Goldin, one of the most influential artists of her time.
The move will see Goldin leave Marian Goodman Gallery, making her the second artist to leave that enterprise in the last six months. In December the painter Gerhard Richter departed Marian Goodman, who had represented him for 30 years, for David Zwirner.
“We were proud to support Goldin’s work and activism over the last 5 years and we wish her well,” a Marian Goodman spokesperson told ARTnews.
Goldin will continue to be represented by San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery alongside Gagosian.
Goldin is now known just as widely for her activism as she is for her groundbreaking photography. Earlier this year, Laura Poitras’s documentary about Goldin and her anti–Sackler family activism, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, was nominated for an Oscar.
Goldin’s work has always been deeply personal. She first gained recognition for documenting the lives of her roommates and closest friends, and later achieved fame for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a 1985 slideshow that featured images of herself, her romantic partner, and others in her orbit. These works are revered today for their frank portrayals of sexuality, queerness, and in some cases abuse.
In 1989, Goldin organized “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” at New York’s Artists Space, one of the first shows to deal outright with artists who were living with or had died from AIDS.
In 2017, Goldin founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an activist group that seeks to highlight funding from the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma produced OxyContin, a painkiller with addictive properties that many have said is responsible for the opioid crisis. A 2018 essay by Goldin that was published in Artforum described her three-year addiction to OxyContin, which resulted in her nearly dying due to a fentanyl overdose.
Activism by P.A.I.N. resulted in many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, promising to stop taking Sackler money and dropping their name from their galleries.
A survey of Goldin’s work is set to tour European museums; it was recently on view at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which originated the show.