Matignon, Paris
Nan Goldin
Blue Hills, Italy
GagosianWindow Vitrine Nan Goldin’s photograph Blue Hills, Italy is on display in the street-facing vitrine at the rue de Ponthieu gallery, to coincide with her retrospective This Will Not End Well, on view at the Grand Palais and the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière. Emerging from the artist’s own life and relationships, Goldin’s practice has exerted a transformative influence over photography in contemporary art. Her photographs and moving-image works address themes of identity, love, sexuality, addiction, and mortality. In recent years, they have also focused increasingly on the natural world. Blue Hills, Italy appears in Goldin’s moving-image work Memory Lost (2019–21), which is included in the Grand Palais retrospective. The undated photograph is presented here in a large-scale format mounted on Dibond. Goldin has chosen to exhibit the image without a frame, thereby dissolving the boundary between the artwork, its setting, and the wider world. Depicting the rural landscape of its title, Blue Hills, Italy evokes the treatment of distant peaks in Renaissance painting, the scene’s color fading and its focus softening as the ridges recede into the distance. Goldin has characterized the work as an attempt to photograph emptiness, one in which the external world functions less as scenery than as emotional register, a field onto which interior states are projected. While Goldin has long taken landscape photographs, the genre has come to play a more central role in her practice over recent years. Working with images from her extensive archives, the artist continues to investigate how landscape relates to our psychological makeup (what she thinks of as “how the outside impacts the inside”) and reports “a fascination with the sky, with clouds.” While these works are concerned with an exploration of beauty, they are also, Goldin comments, “imbued with a kind of loneliness. . . . I think they’re emblematic of my struggle with mortality.”