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The Amsterdam Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Stedelijk (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), founded as a city museum in 1874, was initially housed in the Rijksmuseum before later acquiring its building. Today, it faces Museum Square, where, alongside the Rijksmuseum, you can also find the Van Gogh Museum and the Concert Hall. The Stedelijk Museum specializes in collecting and exhibiting works of modern and contemporary art. Since its foundation, it has functioned both as a museum and a gallery of contemporary art, serving as an „institution for the preservation and historicization of contemporary artistic practices.“

In the Stedelijk Museum, which reopened to the public in September 2012 after six years of reconstruction, the latest wing (named „bathtub“ due to its shape) houses the permanent collection of the museum. This collection includes works by Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Damien Hirst, etc. The innovative facade, resembling ceramic, is constructed from a special type of concrete that gives the building a distinctive appearance.

Stedelijk possesses collections of paintings and sculptures from the 19th and 20th centuries, a significant number of works by Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, and Cézanne, as well as works from European and American art after 1950. In addition to the permanent exhibition, the museum also hosts exhibitions featuring prominent European and global artists such as Bruce Nauman, Ulay, Marlene Dumas, Nan Goldin, etc.

In the largest hall of the Stedelijk Museum, across six separate spaces, the American artist Nan Goldin, known for authentic portraits and snapshot photographs documenting her own life and the lives of her friends in New York and Berlin, returns to the roots of her artistic practice. The exhibition showcases projections featuring thousands of photographs accompanied by music, narratives, and archival material.

Photographs by Nan Goldin, depicting scenes of intimacy or nightlife, make social issues and gender questions visible and open for discussion. As early as the 1970s, Goldin began capturing photographs of her transgender friends. Rejecting bourgeois discourse, she documented herself and them in intimate situations, portraying nudity, sex scenes, prostitution, drugs, and opioid addiction.

„My good psychiatrist once said that I survived because my friends became more important than family,“ she stated. Unfortunately, in the early 1990s, most of Nan Goldin’s models and friends died from AIDS or overdoses.

More about Nan Goldin’s Activism in the Serbian Language