DOUGLAS GORDON
2008
Dimensions and language variable
Unique
Inv. Nr. 52
Born in 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New York City,
New York, USA
Winner of the Turner Prize in 1996, Douglas Gordon first gained recognition in 1993 with his celebrated video installation 24 Hour Psycho, which slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s emblematic movie Psycho to make it last exactly twenty-four hours. This seminal piece is an introduction to Gordon’s work, which deals with recognition and repetition, time and memory, life and death, duplicity and authorship… He uses both appropriated and original material in his practice that encompasses film, photography, installation, text and sound. Gordon is part of a generation of artists who attended the Glasgow School of Art during the nineties, together with Christine Borland, Roderick Buchanan, Nathan Coley, Jonathan Monk, Simon Starling or Richard Wright, and who were greatly influenced by the conceptual art of the seventies. Douglas Gordon’s text-based work, inspired for instance by Art & Language, generates a dialogue between the artist and the viewer that is often directly addressed by the text. The artist said: “I always liked the idea that words, which are supposed to be concrete, when spoken by a different person at a different time can have a completely different meaning.” At the heart of his reflection are the questions of perception and meaning, perfectly illustrated in the work Eye + Eye, which subtly intertwines form and content.