Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish conceptual artist born on 20 September 1966 in Glasgow. Working across video, installation, photography, text and performance, he has become a leading figure in contemporary art, particularly in the field of moving-image practice. He studied Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art from 1984 to 1988 before completing postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1988 to 1990. His interest in cinema and conceptual art subsequently became a defining aspect of his practice. Gordon lives and works in Berlin, Glasgow and New York. Gordon first gained international recognition in the early 1990s with 24 Hour Psycho (1993), a radical reworking of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. By slowing down the original footage so that the film unfolds over 24 hours, the work encourages reflection on memory, time, narrative and anticipation. It also introduced concerns that have remained central to Gordon’s practice: the elasticity of time, the instability of perception and the transformation of familiar cultural material into something strange and unsettling. His art frequently reconfigures found footage, appropriated imagery and references drawn from popular culture to investigate ambiguity, duality and the human psyche. It addresses binary oppositions such as good and evil, light and darkness, and memory and forgetting. Rather than employing straightforward forms of storytelling, Gordon creates experiences that unsettle and expand the ways in which images are perceived and interpreted, whether through video installations, photographic series or text-based works. Throughout his career, Gordon has exhibited extensively at major institutions worldwide, including Tate Britain in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has also participated in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and documenta. His collaborative projects include Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), made with Philippe Parreno, a feature-length film that follows footballer Zinedine Zidane throughout a single match using multiple synchronised cameras. Gordon’s contribution to contemporary art has been recognised with numerous honours, including the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. In 2017, he was appointed a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Across media, his work continues to engage viewers in nuanced investigations of memory, identity, time and the mechanisms through which cultural images acquire meaning.