Douglas Gordon

 

 

 

I’ve always tried to install the screens as if they were sculptures, to be able to reveal the mechanisms of vision. Perhaps it’s a way to deconstruct the magic of cinema while preserving its aura. It will never again be that magic that enchanted us in childhood, but it is a kind of spell. (D. Gordon, 2000)

 

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 20 September 1966. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art (1984-88) and then in London at the Slade School and University College (1988-90). He exhibited for the first time in 1986. Interested in the twofold expressive register and shifts in meaning in verbal communication as in film, Gordon came to the attention of the critics with his video-installations, of unusual dimensions, and his texts printed in widely different patterns on the walls of exhibition spaces, which he considers as places open to dialog and reflection on life, good and evil. In 1993 he exhibited 24 Hour Psycho in the spaces of the Glasgow Tramway. This is perhaps his best-known work: a video in which the artist intervened in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, altering its timing and the moving image, distorting its duration. In 1996 he won the Turner Prize. The following year he was one of the artists invited to the first edition of SkulpturProjekte in Münster and represented Britain at the 47th Venice Biennale, where he won the 2000 award. He received the Hugo Boss prize in 2008 at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo. In July 2005 he curated the exhibition The Vanity of Allegory at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. In the same year he made his cinema debut with Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle, a film midway between documentary and videoart, directed with Philippe Parréno and presented outside the competition at the Festival of Cannes in 2006. In that year the artist organized two important monographic exhibitions: one, Superhumanatural, in the complex of the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the other, Timeline, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lives and works in New York.