Art News: Nan Goldin at the Hayward Gallery, tickets and what to see

Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong opens at the Hayward Gallery in London on 24 November 2026 and runs until 14 March 2027. It is the first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2002 for Nan Goldin, the American photographer and activist, and it closes the Southbank Centre's 75th anniversary year.

What is on show

The exhibition is built around four of her recent films, each running for about 20 minutes:

• Memory Lost (2019–2021), on her own history with drugs and addiction.
• Stendhal Syndrome (2024), which sets intimate portraits of her friends and lovers beside classical art from museums.
• You never did anything wrong, Part I (2024), which turns from people towards animals and the land.
• You never did anything wrong, Part II (2026), shown to the public here for the first time.

With them are photographic stills and images from her archive. The Hayward lists four films, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her best known work, is not among them. There may be queues for the screening rooms, so allow plenty of time.

Nan Goldin exhibition tickets and times

• Dates: 24 November 2026 to 14 March 2027, at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road.
• Tickets: £19, and Southbank Centre Members go free. The Southbank Centre says prices may change with demand.
• Opening times: 10am to 6pm from Tuesday to Friday and on Sunday, and 10am to 8pm on Saturday. Closed on Mondays.
• Age guidance: 12 and over, and under-12s must be with an adult. The show includes depictions of drug use, nudity and some images of a sexual nature.
• Pushchairs: these cannot go into the screening rooms.

We checked these at the start of November, but check with the Hayward before you travel.

Nan Goldin and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Goldin was born in Washington DC in 1953, grew up near Boston and moved to New York in 1978. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency began as colour slides of her circle on the Bowery, shown in clubs and bars with a soundtrack. It grew to about 700 images over some 45 minutes, set to songs from the Velvet Underground to Maria Callas, was screened at the Whitney Biennial in 1985 and came out as a book from Aperture the next year. Tate owns one of the ten copies.

She photographed her friends through the AIDS years and in 1989 organised the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space in New York. In 2017, after her own addiction to opioids, she founded the campaign group P.A.I.N.

How her photographs are valued

Most of what comes to market is editioned colour photography, in silver dye bleach and chromogenic prints, often in small editions and sometimes as grids of several images sold as one work. The slide shows are editioned too, as installations with their soundtrack and projection specification.

Edition number, size and date of printing identify a print, because some images were printed at different times and scales as separate editions. Colour prints of the 1980s and 1990s are sensitive to light, so fading or colour shift is the usual condition issue. The signature, title, date and edition normally appear on the back or on a label.

If you own a work by Nan Goldin, or by another of the famous photographers in our guide, send us photographs of the front, the back and any labels for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

For more to see this season, our guide to London's art exhibitions this winter lists the shows by closing date.

Cover: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In Bed, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.