Douglas Gordon appropriates images from popular culture and other sources to create his signature videos and photographic installations. He first came to prominence in 1993 with the work 24 Hour Psycho, a slowed down version of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic film, and since then he has been at the forefront of contemporary practice worldwide.
Born in Glasgow in 1966, Gordon studied at the Glasgow School of Art and Slade School of Fine Art in London, and now lives and works in Berlin. He represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and has continued to realise his broad artistic interests, including a collaboration with Rufus Wainwright on visuals for his All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu album tour in 2010 and the full-length feature film Zinedine Zidane – a 21st century portrait with French artist Philippe Parreno in 2006.
Gordon has won multiple prizes including the Turner Prize in 1996 and the Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum in 1998. He has exhibited widely across the globe, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
His works speak with intense resonance to issues of moral ambiguity and life’s dualities, and he has amassed an impressive body of work during his long career, including video installations, photographic series and text-based architectural interventions.
Works in in ACCA’s survey exhibition include:
Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake), 1997 – a two-channel projection where William Friedkin’s Exorcist and Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette, two films about the pursuit of good and evil, do battle with each other on either side of a transparent screen.
Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, 1999 a survey within a survey of 101 moving image works that span a twenty-year period of Gordon’s practice.
Through a Looking Glass, 1999 – a double-projection that takes the climactic scene in Martin Scorsese’s iconic film Taxi Driver where the main character addresses the camera and in turn himself.
30 seconds text, 1996 – a conceptual installation that overlaps layers of time through the presentation of an historical text, lighting and architecture.
Everything is nothing without its reflection: a photographic pantomime, 2013 – a major photographic installation playing with ideas of mirroring and portraiture.
“Douglas Gordon is as profound, serious, imaginative and stylistically bold as anyone could wish an artist to be. He has matured in richer, more surprising ways than any of his contemporaries. He is the best British artist of my generation…” – Jonathan Jones, The Guardian UK
Douglas Gordon: The only way out is the only way in
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Exhibition continues to 3 August 2014
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.accaonline.org.au for details.
Image: Douglas Gordon, Through a Looking Glass, 1999. Installation view ACCA 2014 © Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014. Taxi Driver copyright 1976 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved Courtesy Columbia Pictures