Nan Goldin's Magnum Opus Gets a Gagosian Show
All 126 works from ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,’ her genre-defying study.
Summary
- Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery is set to host The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin’s influential photo series, from January 13 through March 21, 2026
- The exhibition delivers a radically incisive reflection on downtown New York, and marks the first UK presentation of the series in full
Nan Goldin once described her seminal series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, as “the diary I let people read.” Lauded as one of the century’s most influential bodies of work, the series embarks on a cultural voyage into East Village’s punk bohemia — the backrooms of bars, empty beds, dim bathrooms and smoke-laden clubs. In her own words, it captured “exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification.”
In London, Gagosian is turning back the clock to take us back to Goldin’s New York. Opening on January 13, 2026, the gallery’s Davies Street location will mount all 126 photographs from The Ballad, marking the first UK presentation of the series in its entirety. The exhibition coincides with the 40th anniversary of its original publication by Aperture, in a moment that “[reaffirms] that desire for transformation and the difficulty of connection and coupling are still true to our world,” the artist described.
Created between 1973 and 1986, the series brings forth a trenchant study of gender, power and intimacy that, even four decades on, feels nothing short of alive. An unapologetically intimate ledger of community, Goldin noted, “I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life. These pictures come out of relationships, not observation. They are an invitation to my world, but now they have become a record of the generation that was lost.”
Formally daring and chromatically radical, The Ballad affirmed Goldin’s position at the vanguard, as she helped propel photography away from the margins and into the center of contemporary art discourse. Both a “manifesto and opening salvo,” per Gagosian, the series set the course of a decades-long career that reshaped the expressive possibilities of the image itself.
For those in London, the artist’s upcoming Gagosian exhibition will be up at the Davies Street gallery from January 13 through March 21, 2026. The Ballad, in its original slideshow form, is concurrently on view in Milan as part of This Will Not End Well, a major retrospective devoted to Goldin’s moving image work at Pirelli HangarBicocca.
Gagosian Davies Street
17–19 Davies Street,
London W1K 3DE
