Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon is Glasgow’s most successful and critically-acclaimed artist.

Gordon exemplifies interest in re-use of existent material and layering of different time frames: with the viewer always building narrative – envisaging future. Gordon’s work is always brilliantly inclusive of the viewer – both shared knowledge brought to experience and presence in space.

In his oeuvre, Douglas Gordon explores antagonisms such as dread and temptation, death and life, innocence and guilt. This may be expressed, as in “Play Dead: Real Time”, by a camera circling a trained elephant that lies down as if facing imminent death, or, as in “B-Movie”, by showing a fly that, after wriggling its legs for a long time, eventually dies. The artist works with various media, such as film, installation, text, and sound, in addition to sculpture. In his video works, Douglas Gordon frequently uses original films that he alters by means of slow motion, repetition, rewind, or dissolve, thereby reinterpreting them. This approach allows him to transfer the myths, images, and projections of cinema to the realm of art. Douglas Gordon is probably best known for his way of dealing with Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Psycho”. His first installation work was his 1993 film projection “24 hours Psycho”, which, according to Lewis Biggs, former director of Tate Liverpool, was “one of the defining icons of contemporary art in the last decade.”

Since his first solo show in 1986, Douglas Gordon has exhibited extensively, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centro Cultrual de Belém in Portugal, and the DIA Center for the Arts in New York. A 2001 retrospective organized by the Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles traveled to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. His work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento, Italy. Gordon was the 1996 recipient of Britain’s Turner Prize, in 1997 was awarded Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennial, and in 1998 he was presented with the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo. Gordon’s film ‘Zidane, a 21st century portrait’ made in collaboration with Philippe Parreno was premiered at the Cannes and Edinburgh Film Festivals 2006.

Place of Birth: Glasgow
Now living: Berlin/Glasgow