The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center have jointly acquired Nan Goldin‘s Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a slideshow-based work presented via a single-channel video with an accompanying soundtrack.
The purchase was made possible through the Curators’ Council Fund for Women Artists at the Walker and the Jean MacMillan Southam Fund at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The work will make its Canadian debut at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Pairing two decades of Goldin’s photographs with a deeply personal voiceover, Stendhal Syndrome explores the emotional and psychological power of art. The title references the psychosomatic condition that causes dizziness or euphoria in response to beauty—a fitting metaphor for Goldin’s signature blend of intimacy and intensity.
The work was first presented in September 2024 at Gagosian’s New York gallery as part of the exhibition “You never did anything wrong,” the artist’s first solo show since joining the gallery in 2023. In that exhibition, Stendhal Syndrome was accompanied by a score composed by Soundwalk Collective and shown within a freestanding pavilion designed by Goldin in collaboration with architect Hala Wardé, merging architecture, sound, and image into a total work of art.
Photographs of classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces from institutions including the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Prado in Madrid flow seamlessly with images of Goldin’s friends, family, and lovers. The resulting juxtapositions reveal uncanny resemblances in composition, color, and emotional tone—collapsing centuries of art history into a single continuum of beauty, desire, and loss. Goldin’s ability to draw these connections, between her own life and the canon of Western art, raises questions about hierarchy, devotion, and the enduring human impulse to memorialize love through images.
