EDINBURGH, Scotland – Nan Goldin is an American photographer best known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Her photographs serve to document herself and those closest to her, particularly the LGBTQ community and associated heroin-addicted subcultures. One of her photographs is featured in a Lyon & Turnbull Contemporary and Postwar Art auction on Thursday, April 16.
Influenced by the fashion photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, Goldin’s earliest photographic works are portraits of close friends glamorously dressed in drag. From the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, while she was living in New York, Goldin continued to socialize with and photograph people of ambiguous gender. She intended her work to be an homage to their beauty and courage; exploring drag and its ability to fulfill the fantasy of reconstructed identities.
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, a work to be offered by Lyon & Turnbull on Thursday, is part of a large series of color photographs of glamorous drag queens taken by Goldin in New York, Paris and Berlin in 1991. This picture was taken in a cab as her friends headed uptown to join their float in the New York City Pride March. The camera’s flash has illuminated their heavy makeup and shiny clothes. In 2018, Goldin collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme by contributing three of her photographs, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC (1991), Kim in Rhinestones, Paris (1991), and Nan as a dominatrix, Cambridge, MA (1978) to their spring/summer collection
With her captivating and immediate ‘snapshot’ style, Nan Goldin’s photography creates an intersection of autobiographical detail and documentary storytelling, as she honestly captures her friends as they live their lives, creating a body of work that is at once radical, intimate, personal, joyful and moving.
Today, Goldin’s works are held in collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Lyon & Turnbull will present their Contemporary & Postwar Art auction to be held online only on Thursday, April 16. The spring sale includes an engaging and diverse collection of contemporary art and photography, featuring works by Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi, John Bellany, Alasdair Gray, Helmut Newton, Nan Goldin, Bert Stern, Pablo Picasso, L.S. Lowry and Rachel Whiteread, among others.
Striking photography leads the April sale with Saddle I, Paris – 1976 by Helmut Newton (German/Australian 1920-2004) created as part of a picture story for Vogue Hommes.
The sale also includes works by renowned Scottish Contemporary & Post War Art artists, led by Alan Davie (British 1920-2014)’s Bird Through the Wall, No. 8 and Eduardo Paolozzi (Scottish 1924-2005)’s Maquette for Great Ormond Street alongside a group of exceptional works by John Bellany (Scottish 1942-2013) and a wonderfully detailed group of lots by “the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art which began in the penultimate decade of the 20th century,” Alasdair Gray (Scottish 1934-2019).
For more information go to www.lyonandturnbull.com