Douglas Gordon (b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He is an artist whose time and perception-based practice spaces thoroughly include both issues of collective memory and society’s consolidated familiarity with commodities of life. Objects of discussion hence embed the moving image or mechanisms of everyday existence, which he elaborates through a whole range of diverse outputs, from video narration and film to sound productions, manipulated photographic prints and text installations.
One of his most renowned works, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), is an excellent example of Gordon’s methodology of alteration, monumentalization and alienation of the viewers’ gaze and understanding of the moving image and media in general, obtained throughout the manipulation and superimposition of actual video material – which also turns into a reframing of memories themselves. The work consists of a slowed-down version of Hitchcock’s film, lasting 24 hours, to be projected onto a translucent screen. The work is meant to erase away from the viewers all the preexisting tension and suspense of the original version. Over the last decades, the artist has continued his work of distorting perceptions, up to his latest abstractions of digital images, which he pixels to the point of creating a visual illusion for the spectator (Presque Rien, 2015).
Gordon has shown his work internationally and had numerous solo exhibitions and retrospectives such as Black Spot at the Tate Liverpool (2000); Douglas Gordon at MOCA, Los Angeles (2001); Timeline at the MoMA, New York (2006); Between Darkness and Light: Works 1989–2007 at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2007); Blood, Sweat, Tears at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2009) and Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now at Musée d’Art Modern, Paris (2014). In 2005, he was the curator of The Vanity of Allegory at the former Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin and released the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. His film works have also been invited to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Venice Film Festival, and Edinburgh International Film Festival. Among others, Gordon was also the recipient of the Turner Prize (1996), the Venice Biennal’s Premio 2000 (1997), the Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1998) and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize (2012).
