After awarding Nan Goldin the 2022 Käthe Kollwitz Prize, the Academy of Arts presents an exhibition spanning five decades of the American artist’s work. Goldin is a key figure in contemporary photography worldwide. The images she created while recording her personal life and that of the LGBTQ community have broken taboos; she has shifted boundaries while campaigning for acceptance and a better recognition of the scene. The sense of immediacy in Goldin’s photographs comes from her physical and emotional allegiance and proximity to a living environment that remains off-limits to most – a world her work opened up to a wider public.

The exhibition presents black-and-white and colour photographs from the early years in Boston, New York, Berlin and Asia, as well as current large-scale works including landscapes and the Grids. The selection illustrates Nan Goldin’s artistic strategy of conceiving her images in rhythmic sequences; the result is an accumulation of expanding and evolving compositions and their interrelationships.