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NAN GOLDIN (American, b. 1953) JIMMY PAULETTE ON DAVID’S BIKE, NYC, 1991 signed, titled, dated an...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:10,000.00 - 15,000.00 USD
NAN GOLDIN (American, b. 1953) JIMMY PAULETTE ON DAVID’S BIKE, NYC, 1991 signed, titled, dated an...
NAN GOLDIN
(American, b. 1953)
JIMMY PAULETTE ON
DAVID’S BIKE, NYC, 1991
signed, titled, dated and editioned
in ink on verso
Cibachrome print
image: 151?4 x 23 in. (38.7 x 58.4 cm)
paper: 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm)
1991
this print is number 7
from an edition of 25
ESTIMATE: $10,000-15,000
LITERATURE
David Armstrong, Walter Keller and Nan Goldin, NAN GOLDIN: THE OTHER SIDE, NEW YORK, Scalo, 1993, pl. 64 (illustrated)
Nan Goldin, I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR, NEW YORK, Whitney Museum of American Art exh. cat., Scalo, 1996, p. 310 (illustrated)
“Nan Goldin,” PORTFOLIO, Bibliothek der Fotografie No. 11, [n.d. circa 1998] front cover (illustrated)
In the early 1990s, after more than a decade of chronicling her life in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin turned her attention to mixed-gender subjects. Jimmy Paulette, one of the drag queens who wandered into Goldin’s life (and thereby her lens), appears in several of Goldin’s photos. Here, in Jimmy Paulette on David’s Bike, NYC, 1991, a childlike moment is captured as Jimmy Paulette rides on the back of another friend’s bicycle. With an innate grace of gesture and carefully glamorous makeup and hair, Jimmy Paulette can’t help but be elegant and seductive even in the briefest snapshot moment in which the two pass Goldin’s camera.
As lovely as the exchange documented in this photograph is, it cannot be extricated from the context of the painful reality of Goldin’s world in which, by the 1990s, the extravagance and indulgence of the 1970s and 1980s had taken effect. The playful moment here seems to indicate a pause in a time of cumulative difficulties as friends and family were lost to drugs and AIDS and to suggest the bravery of employing beauty and whimsy in the face of a grim reality.
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