Diving for Pearls

In her newest work, Nan Goldin merges her deep admiration for the artworks of the past with a lifelong dedication to her most immediate circle of friends. Invited by the Louvre, she photographed artworks of her choice at the museum and, guided by aesthetic and associative considerations, connected them to earlier photographs of her friends and lovers. In this way she not only draws inspiration from the rich sources of art history but revisits her own oeuvre of the last 40 years. The striking similarities between the two different pictorial worlds exert an intense dynamic on the viewer. The series, which yielded over 400 photographs, was shown for the first time in its full scope at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. For this occasion, Diving for Pearls was conceived as an independent artist book which, alongside Goldin’s newest work 'Saints,' contains a selection of photographs that have never been published before.