Nan Goldin

Between them and me: telepathic exchanges, divination.
—Nan Goldin

Gagosian Rome is pleased to present Nan Goldin’s Scopophilia. This is the renowned photographer’s first major exhibition in Rome.

The Greek term scopophilia literally means “love of looking,” but also refers to the erotic pleasure derived from gazing at images of the body. Goldin’s Scopophilia is both a slideshow and an ongoing photographic series, begun in 2010 when she was given private access to the Musée du Louvre every Tuesday, while the museum was closed to the public. During these privileged sojourns, she wandered and photographed freely throughout the museum’s renowned collections of painting and sculpture.

Goldin’s errant experiences at the Louvre confirmed that many of her artistic obsessions—sex, violence, rapture, despair, and the mutability of gender—stem from deep imaginative currents in Western art history, myth, and religious iconography that have potent sources, from the transformative myth of Pygmalion to the second-century marble, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite. Many of Goldin’s own photographs that she has paired with Louvre imagery have never before been exhibited; some were unearthed from her archives by her assistant and others she resurrected herself. The result is a collective portrait about love and desire, propelled by “all of the pleasure circuits deeply fulfilled by looking.”