Nan Goldin

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce that Nan Goldin has been given the 2007 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.

For over 25 years, the Hasselblad Award has been granted annually to a photographer “recognized for major achievements. This may be an individual who has made a pioneering achievement in photography, who has had a decisive impact on one or more younger generations of photographers, or who has implemented one or more internationally significant photographic projects.”

Today in Göteborg, Sweden, the Hasselblad Foundation announced that Nan Goldin is to receive this honor in 2007 because she “is one of the most significant photographers of our time. She has been documenting her own life and that of her friends—her extended family—for more than 30 years, focusing on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, marked so dramatically by HIV and AIDS. The presentation of her work in the form of slide shows resonates in the work of photographers of more than one generation. Her use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss, and as an act of preservation responds to the needs of our times.”

Previous Hasselblad Award winners include Ansel Adams (1981), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1982), Richard Avedon (1991), William Eggleston (1998), Cindy Sherman (1999), Jeff Wall (2002), Bernd & Hilla Becher (2004), and Lee Friedlander (2005).

The award will be presented to the artist in a ceremony in Göteborg, the seat of the Hasselblad Foundation, in November. The presentation will also mark the opening of an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Hasselblad Center, part of the Göteborg Art Museum.

Nan Goldin is admitted to the French Legion of Honor
June 27, 2006

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce that Nan Goldin has been admitted to the French Legion of Honor.

Each year France recognizes a small number of foreign citizens for their outstanding achievement in the field of arts and letters by admitting them to the Legion of Honor, which is the country’s most senior order, founded over 200 years ago and headed by the president of the republic.

Nan Goldin’s work has been presented in many important international exhibitions over the past twenty years. She was commissioned by the city of Paris to make a three-screen projection to be exhibited at the Chapelle de la Salpêtrière during the city’s Festival d’Automne in October of 2004. The work she made, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, is the first installation by the artist to include moving pictures and a fully narrative score and voiceover; it is thus the first significant foray into cinema that the artist has made in her career. This new form is a natural development of her slideshow presentations, like The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, for which she first became well-known. The commissioned work was exhibited at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York this past spring.

Ms. Goldin will be officially welcomed to the Legion in a ceremony in Paris on June 27, 2006.