This Will Not End Well / Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Elephant Mask, Boston, 1985 © Nan Goldin

Icon of contemporary photography, Nan Goldin is exhibited as a filmmaker. The Grand Palais presents the first retrospective in France devoted to her videos and slideshows, which the artist describes as “films made up of stills”. An intimate journey through her life, her friendships, her loves, and her struggles.

Nan Goldin (born in Washington D.C. in 1953) is recognized as a major artist who has revolutionized contemporary photography and visual culture of our time.

From 1979 to the present, she has produced numerous slideshows from thousands of photographs she has taken of her everyday life, her close circle, their intimacy, and family events. Her narratives, drawn from her own experience, explore themes such as childhood, gender, violence and drug addiction. Raw and intimate, the stories she reveals stand as universal tales of love and loss.

Nan Goldin, Sunny in my room, Paris, 2009 © Nan Goldin. Courtesy Gagosian

Nan Goldin, Couple in bed, Chicago, 1977 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Brian and Nan in Kimono, 1983 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Heart-Shaped Bruise, New York City, 1980 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Gina at Bruce’s Dinner Party, New York City, 1991 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, French Chris on The Convertible, New York City, 1979 © Nan Goldin

At the Grand Palais, the exhibition is installed in buildings designed by the architect Hala Wardé. Each building is designed in response to the specific piece it houses; together, they constitute a village. This village extends to the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, where the installation conceived for this space in 2004 as part of the Festival d’Automne, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, is presented.

The exhibition brings together six major works covering fifty years of work: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), her magnum opus; The Other Side (1992–2021), a homage to her trans friends photographed between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), a testament to the trauma of families and the taboo of suicide; Memory Lost (2019–2021), a claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal; Sirens (2019–2020), a trip into drug ecstasy; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a work based on six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which explores the condition described by Stendhal as a collapse provoked by the overwhelming beauty of art.

Nan Goldin, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, 2002–2022

Nan Goldin, The Paw, Eclipse, 2024

Nan Goldin, Sirens, 2019-2021 / Installation view at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Nan Goldin, Self Portrait at New Year’s Eve, Malibu 2006 in Memory Lost

While the title of the exhibition This Will Not End Well may seem dark and foreboding, it is also full of irony and emotion. According to Fredrik Liew, curator for the retrospective, it reflects Nan Goldin’s ‘characteristically unshakeable joie de vivre’.

After travelling to Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Milan, the exhibition now arrives in Paris, at the Grand Palais and the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, offering a unique immersion into Nan Goldin’s intimate, moving, and profoundly human world.

Exhibition organized by Moderna Museet in collaboration with Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, Paris.

Nan Goldin, The Hug, New York, 1980 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Falling buildings, Rome, 2004 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Nan one month after being battered, 1984 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Couple on the blue beach, n.d., from digital slideshow ‘Memory Lost’, 2019–2021 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (born in Washington D.C. in 1953) is one of the most high-profile artists of our time. Her work’s exploration of the human experience is legendary and has profoundly influenced subsequent generations. Her first work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, documents life in Provincetown, New York, Berlin and London beginning in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present day. Goldin photographed the world of her inner circle of creative, bohemian friends with raw tenderness. Her photographs give us snapshots of intimacy and coupling, the quotidian and wild parties, and the struggle between autonomy and dependency.

Of the generation whose experiences were defined by the freedom of life before AIDS and an alternative world outside normative society, Goldin’s work also stands as a document of the times. Around 1980 Goldin began presenting her slideshows in various clubs and public venues in New York, as well as at underground cinemas and film festivals in Europe. She updated and reedited her slideshow every time and used multiple projectors, which she operated against the background of an eclectic soundtrack. Goldin’s ability to revisit these slideshows has since formed the core of her artistic practice. Over the past 40 years Goldin has produced a dozen different slideshows – from portraits of her friends to accounts of traumatic family events. Since then, she has added elements into her works such as moving images, voices and archival materials.

Nan Goldin, Amanda at the sauna, Hotel Savoy, Berlin, 1983 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City, 1983 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, C Performing as Madonna, Bankok, 1992 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Butch in the tub, NYC, 1988 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Jimmy Paulette after the parade, NYC, 1991 © Nan Goldin

Alongside Goldin’s influence on art and the art world, it is also difficult to think of today’s fashion and advertising photography without reflecting on her ground-breaking paradigms of visual expression.

A comprehensive catalogue is produced to accompany the exhibition, with 216 pages, 140 of which are illustrated, and texts by Vince Aletti, Thomas Beard, Guido Costa, Marvin Heiferman, Roni Horn, Patrick Radden Keefe, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Fredrik Liew, Andrea Lissoni, Gabor Maté, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, Alfred Pacquement, Darryl Pinckney, Rene Ricard, Lucy Sante, Sarah Schulman, Anne Swärd, Hala Wardé and David Wojnarowicz. The catalogue is published in English and is distributed internationally by Steidl Verlag.

Nan Goldin, Left: Orlando and Lily doing ballet, Brooklyn, New York, 2006 / Right: Bruno with the tattoo, Naples, 1995, from the digital slideshow ‘Fire Leap’, 2010–2022 © Nan Goldin

Many international institutions have hosted Nan Goldin’s solo exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Australia (2023), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2022), Art Institute of Chicago (2020), Tate Modern, London (2019), Triennale di Milano (2017), MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016), Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2012), Louvre Museum, Paris (2010), Kiasma, Helsinki (2008), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007, 2001), La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, Paris (2004), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Quebec (2003), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Museu Serralves, Porto, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2002), Reina Sofía, Madrid (2001), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (1998), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1997), Fotomuseum Winterthur (1997), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1996), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (1996), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1994), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1993), and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1985).

Her work has been featured in multiple editions of the Whitney Biennial in New York (1985, 1993, 1995) and in the Biennale of Sydney (1996). After four decades of artistic practice, she was honored with a prestigious invitation to exhibit at the 2022 Venice Biennale with her slideshow Sirens (2019– 2021).

Goldin was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 2006 and has received several prestigious awards, including the Kering Women in Motion Award for Photography (2025), the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, Berlin (2022), the Centenary Medal from London’s Royal Photographic Society (2018), the Edward MacDowell Medal, New Hampshire (2012), and the Hasselblad Award, Gothenburg, Sweden (2007).

This Will Not End Well / Nan Goldin
March 18 – June 21, 2026 / Grand Palais, Paris
Visit the website >

Previous Dates:

Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
October 9, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Moderna Museet, Stockholm
October 29, 2022 – February 26, 2023

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
October 7, 2023 – January 28, 2024

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
November 23, 2024 – February 23, 2025