Intimacy on Display: Nan Goldin “You Never Did Anything Wrong”

You can live a whole life looking for the right place to draw the line or you can open your eyes to see it dissolve as Nan Goldin does. In You Never Did Anything Wrong, her latest show at Gagosian, Goldin smashes centuries of art and modern life together in a way that makes you rethink what belongs in a museum and what gets hidden away in your camera roll. Raw, personal, and perfectly Goldin. 

Goldin is the chronicler of intimacy. She’s the one who turned her camera inward long before Instagram made it trendy to do so. Her work cuts through the performative and captures the unvarnished. “You Never Did Anything Wrong” gives us a first-time glimpse into a new Goldin—one still familiar but also breaking her own rules, fusing photography and film in ways that haven’t been done before. Stepping deep into abstract territories, she blends Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces with intimate portraits of friends and lovers as if they belong in the same breath. And maybe they do.

The exhibition is a standout, it evokes a third eye that constantly invites you to curate your life. Looking at the pieces you can find a brief manifesto of how art is a medium that interacts and connects with the modern world. The centerpiece “Stendhal Syndrome” (2024) stands out as a striking contrast of classical art and personal moments. Goldin dares us to think about contrastwhile merging Renaissance art with modern pictures of her inner circle, collapsing centuries in a way that makes the “high art” versus “everyday life” divide seem ridiculous. The visual parallels are unsettling and deliberate, making you question what we choose to immortalize and why.

Conceptually, the exhibition weaves a heavy knit of deeply humane themes. Goldin’s use of grids, creates a visual conversation between Renaissance masterpieces and her own deeply intimate snapshots. What otherwise might feel unrelated, connects through her curation in a meaningful way. In “Orpheus Dying” (2024), for example, a 19th-century painting mirrors a 1977 photo of her lover Tony, both figures caught in the same haunting pose, making the viewer confront the timelessness of grief and beauty.

In her fifty-year career, Nan Goldin has always been a step ahead, a provocateur. This exhibition proves she’s still evolving, still pushing, still fearless. If you thought you knew Nan Goldin, this show will make you question everything you thought you understood. And honestly? That’s the whole point.