Douglas Gordon

Research: Nelly Bright

Born: September 20, 1966

Place of birth : Glascow, Scotland

Residence : Lives and works in New York.

Training : - Glascow School of Art, Glasgow BA - 1984-1988

- Slade School of Fine Arts, London - Graduate Program.1988-1990.

Field: -Video Art & Photography.

In the 1993 Douglas Gordon received the National Galleries of Scotland award for ; “24 Hour Psycho” . One of his best known work. He slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, ‘Psycho” so that it lasts twenty-four hours (.YouTube Meet the Artist: Douglas Gordon – SmithsonianVideo). This is a two part video, presented by the Director of the Hirshhorn Museum during the marathon projection of Psycho. “Monster” which is in Anxiety”s Edge is also referred to).

- 1996 “MONSTER” is his best known self-portrait. He appears as the captive of dual personalities like a Dr.Jekyll, multiple identities lie beyond the initial split and each is as authentic or as false as any other, true and untrue. He is depicted as undergoing some forces of transformation. Gordon states::” it seems an exciting thing to sum up all these ideas about reflections and mirroring in a simple work”.

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- 1996 Turner Prize. This prize, named after the painter J.M.W.Turner 1775-1851) is associated primarily with Conceptual Art. It is one of the most prestigious awards.. It is given to a visual art artist, under the age of fifty, who “had made an outstanding exhibition or presentation”.

- 1997 Represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.

- 1998 Hugo Boss Prize 1998. (The Hugo Boss Clothing Company Prize is a biannual prize, awarded to an artist or group of artists working in any medium, anywhere in the world. This prize is administered by the Guggenheim Museum.

-2005 Exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin “The Vanity of Allegory, where he explores the veiled self-portrait as an act of vanity – a ploy to remain immortal.

- 2006 The National Galleries of Scotland “SUPRHUMANATURAL. His first major solo exhibit in Scotland. Gordon plays with the idea of ‘superhuman” and ‘supernatural’ and also the opposite of ‘human’ and natural’.

- 2006 - ZIDANE a 21st Century Portrait ((Zinedine Yazid ZIDANE was born in Marseilles of immigrant Algerian parents. .He is considered one of the greatest football player of all times. (soccer) .This 90 minute documentary and conceptual art installation of a Soccer game featuring Real Madrid vs Villareal where Gordon follows the player not the match, is the purest depiction of football.

- 2006 The MART – Museo di arte moderne e contemporaneo di Trente e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy. Multiple videos on two levels of the museum.

- 2006 The Museum of Modern Art, New York TIMELINE focuses on moving image and textual works and addresses universal dualities such as life and death, good and evil and female and male.

-2007 MALBA Colleccion Costantini, Buenos Aires “” MOMA’s Timeline”.

-2008 Won the Roswitha Hauftmann Prize . Gordon has developed a unique mode of expression using video and film installations. He is one of the leading artists amongst the mid-generation video artists. He often plays a double game by undermining the credibility of images . BY using modern media he unsettles the viewer’s faculties of perception. Gordon has a predilection for dissecting, splintering and doubling images or for turning them into their own opposites.

Gordon plays optical tricks on the viewer with unexpected cuts on existing film. With completely new contexts and sound he arouses expectation that are either not fulfilled by the imagery or take on new associations. He uses his art to explore temptation and fear, life and death. He draws the viewer in demonstrating that their own lives are both volatile and contradictory”.

- 2011 Deutsche Guggenheim “ Once upon a Time” Douglas Gordon’s work vigorously and intelligently tackles the issues that have defined the art of our time. Through video, film, photography and text he has wrestled with the complexities of representation, raised questions of authorship, expanded the vagaries of memory and perception and examined the pull of popular culture.

References: - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto – 2006 Exhibition Catalogue..

- The Museum of contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001) Douglas Gordon prettymucheverywordwritten, spoken, heard, overheard from 1989, MART 2006.