Co-curated with Elisabeth Sussman.

“For me taking a picture is a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on – I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.” The American photographer Nan Goldin has become a pioneer and model for an entire generation of photographers with her unique form of sympathetic documentation.

In New York, in the East Village and the Lower East Side in which she lived – happiness and suffering, the poetic and the painful of contemporary life meet more often here than elsewhere. The exhibition shows the euphoria and desperation of drug use, then the misery and crisis of the spread of AIDS. It reflects the collective will to survive, the struggle with loss and the opening of her circle of friends into Europe and Asia. Nan Goldin’s masterful situation images and her stirring, complex portraits from the middle of her life lead us directly into the condition humana of the end of the 20th century.