We’ve selected a few key objects from our collection for you to explore. These are the highlights of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art & Dean Gallery.
Douglas Gordon
List of Names (Random)1990 - ongoingOn Display | GALLERY OF MODERN ART
This work consists of a list of names, displayed in columns, as if it were a war memorial or a roll of honour. They are the names of everyone the artist has ever met, or more precisely, everyone he can remember meeting. Gordon says of this work, 'It was an accurate and honest statement but it was full of mistakes (like forgetting the names of some friends), so there were some embarrassing elements in the work, but that all seemed to be quite close to the truth of how our head functions anyway. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.'
- Accession no. GMA 4335
- Medium Wall text, typeface variable
- Size Variable
- Credit Purchased (Iain Paul Fund) 2000.
Douglas Gordon (Scottish, born 1966)
Gordon was born in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has worked in video, photography, sound, text and other media and uses predominantly 'found' material. Gordon is fascinated by our binary nature and our tendency to split things into opposites: black and white, good and evil. His work investigates ambiguity and the disruption of the normal, accepted ways of seeing the world. He is one of the most successful of contemporary Scottish artists, winning prestigious art prizes in Europe and the United States, including the Turner Prize in 1996.