Douglas Gordon

Monster Reborn

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About this artwork

Gordon uses doubles and opposites in his work to question ideas about good and evil, positive and negative, male and female. As a Scottish artist, he often uses his own image to explore the ‘dual’ identity of Scottish culture, as exemplified in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This work is a double self-portrait, and is the same photograph used in the artist’s 1996 work Monster, except here the image is reversed so that the distorted face is on the left instead of the right. Gordon has used sticky tape to distort his face, making him virtually unrecognisable from the sober-looking man on the right. The viewer is thus prompted to wonder if both states can co-exist in one body, and who came first, the monster or the artist?

Updated before 2020

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Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon