On the 30th of May 2005 (from 7 pm to 10 pm), in Turin , Via Mazzini 24, Guido Costa Projects will open its gallery to “Stardust”, the new show of the American artist Nan Goldin.
Well known by the greater audience since the mid 80’s, Nan Goldin has been universally considered as one of the most influential and revolutionary artists of the international. Her shots, true icons of contemporary underground culture, marked a radical change of taste and aesthetics, becoming a referencepoint for at least two generations of photographers and young artists.
A truly charismatic and volcanic personality, Nan Goldin has mixed street culture with the sophisticated world of contemporary art by imposing her radical and social point of view and by exposing the beauty of everyday life. She offers an essential tool for the social claims and the fights for the political rights of the minorities.
Artistically grown up with the late 70’s New York underground culture, sharing those codes, but never belonging to movements or trends in any particular stream, she has been able to feel the taste and the expectations of the moment, building her own manifesto of a raw and concrete art, always very close to provocation.
Nan Goldin has been an interested filter of radical political thought from those years, a true witness and activist in the fight against sexual discrimination, prohibitionism and a supporter of many AIDS campaigns.
She also is a perfect sample of total art - neither didactic nor ideologically expected - she built her artistic expression on direct experience and her own aesthetic, always hunting for truth and justice.
Her photographs of the 70’s and 80’s as well as her latest production (mainly oriented towards spirituality and the inner dimension of relationships), have radically changed the relation between the photographer and their subject in the artistic field and in mass culture as well, becoming a common and imitated model in social reportage and in fashion photography.
Only a few living artists have gained such a wide popularity and developed such deep roots in youth culture.
Since the 80’s she attained a steady place in the best museums and galleries all over the world and she has been exhibiting in America, Europe and the Far East and has travelled worldwide with her two retrospective exhibitions from 1996 to 2004.
Nan Goldin works of the last decades continues many of the same themes, but with more enphasis on her spiritual quest and on the more inner dimensions of relathionships
She is a steady presence in the most important public and private collections in the globe and she has been recently decorated with Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, award by the Governement of France, the country where she lives for the last five years.
The opening of “Stardust” will be on May 30th in Turin, at Guido Costa Projects and means to be an homage to the birth of Nan Goldin’s art and to her leading themes: the role of the third gender.
For the very first time, some of her seminal shots from the start of her long career have been collected to show the beginning moments of her aesthetics and photographic poetry.
“Stardust” has the ambition of being a unique exhibition because of its coherence of subjects and the extreme rarity of the artworks shown for the first time.

Drag Queens are some of her leading stars: they are becomes they her most known subjects – as well as the photos of her masterpiece “ The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy”.
From the enormous corpus of photographs of Drag Queens, shot accross 30 years by Nan Goldin, some of thefirst pictures from the early 70’s have been selected. These rare shots represent the very first steps of the artist, real prototypes for all the following works, from the 70’s to the early 90’s. The three pictures from the 90’s, Joey at the Love Ball, New York 1991; Misty and Jimmy Paulette in the taxi, New York 1991; C putting her makeup at the Second Tip, Bangkok 1992, are key works: they are shown in big format.
Guido Costa Projects is also very proud to present, for the first time in Italy, a new edit of the seminal 10 minute slide show “The Other Side”, from 1996/97, entirely dedicated to Drag Queens, only been presented worldwide, in the eleven years since was created, in several occasion.

“Stardust” will be open May 30 in the presence of Nan Goldin and will remain open until July 29 2005, from Monday to Saturday as usual.

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Nan Goldin was born in Washington DC in 1953. She starts shooting at the age of 16 and she holds her first exhibition of black and white pictures of Drag Queens during 1972. After some years in Boston spent studying photography at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, she moves to New York in 1978 and starts up her great work “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, that will become a testimony to 15 years of life. She participates in the Biennal of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1985, where she published the Ballad as a book and gained international success and fame. This is the book that changed the course of contemporary photography. She moves to Berlin in 1991, a guest of DAAD. Then in 1996 her first great retrospective exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” opens first at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and then at some of the most important museums in Europe (Vienna, Madrid, Prague, Wolfsburg). In 1997 her first personal exhibition in Italy, in Naples, at TH.E Gallery. During 2001 her second great museum retrospective “Devil’s Playground” travels from Paris to London, through Porto, Warsaw and Turin. Finally in 2005 she opens up a great multimedia art-work “Sisters, Saints and Sybils”, at the Salpetriere Chapel in Paris and is awarded the Commandeur des Arts et Lettres from the French Governement.
Besides “ The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1986), Nan Goldin has realased many other books, such as “The Other Side” (1992), “Vakat” ( con Joachim Sartorius,1993), “Tokyo Love” (with Nobujoshi Araki 1994), “Double life” (with David Armstrong, 1994) “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (1996), “Ten Years After, Naples 1986-1996” (with Guido Costa, 1998) “Couples and Loneliness” (1999), “Devil’s Playground” (2004). She has lived and worked in Paris and London since 2000. Nan Goldin is represented by Matthew Marks in New York, Yvon Lambert in Paris, White Cube in London, Spruth,Magers in Cologne/Munchen, Guido Costa Projects in Turin.