Douglas Gordon is one of the most prominent British artists of his generation. He trained at Glasgow School of Art and then at Slade School of Art, London. He has achieved huge international recognition, marked by major awards, including the Turner Prize in 1996, and by exhibitions in museums in Europe and America.

The ARTIST ROOMS collection contains five important works dating from 1995 to 2010, including a large video installation, three video monitor pieces and a text-based work. These cover many of Gordon’s recurrent themes such as recognition and repetition, time and memory, authorship and authenticity, as well as dualities such as darkness and light, positive and negative, and the tensions between good and evil.

The video work Film Noir (Fly) 1995 – depicting a fly in close-up, fixed to a table top by its wings as it struggles and eventually dies – demonstrates how a simple image can produce complex or even troubling readings. A Divided Self I and II 1996, which references the classic novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of 1886 by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) is an example of Gordon exploring themes such as supposed opposites within a single piece.

Gordon has produced a large number of text-based works, which often generate a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, who is directly addressed by the text. The work I am the curator of my own misery 2010, is an example, which prompts questions of perception and meaning. The installation Looking down with his black, black, ee 2008 takes its title from a popular Scottish poem about a bird sitting on a treetop, while looking down on a group of children, suggesting foreboding menace.

Onto the huge, free-standing screens which form part of the video installation Play Dead, Real Time 2003 images are projected of an elephant acting out an old circus trick: playing dead. The two screens are virtually the same size as the elephant. The small television monitor that forms part of the same installation concentrates on the elephant’s eye. By separating the image this way Gordon alludes to the relationship between the body and mind.

Douglas Gordon makes videos, installations, photographs and text pieces, using both found and original material, in an attempt to lay bare the ambiguities of human life. In Gordon’s world nothing is good or evil – but both at the same time. Gordon’s religious upbringing made him deeply aware of human beliefs and he uses these throughout his work. In addition his interest in psychoanalysis led him to explore the complexities of the human mind and especially the nature of schizophrenia. Gordon explores the degree to which we are all subject to shifting identities. He uses techniques of doubling and mirroring in works including Divided Self I and II (1996), a video showing a smooth arm and a hairy arm wrestling. 

In 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Gordon takes Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1960 film Psycho and slows it down so that it runs for twenty-four hours. This key work is deceptively simple, but has devastating consequences, exposing the way that memory works in the flow of our consciousness. Everyone knows the plot of Psycho and can anticipate what will happen, but in Gordon’s version, this is constantly frustrated, since the future never seems to come.

The text installation List of Names (1990–ongoing) also explores the role of memory. The artist attempted to remember everyone he had ever met. In a way, it is a self-portrait, since we are what we remember. Likewise, a work such as Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. (1999), an array of video monitors showing a lifetime of Gordon’s creative achievements, is a series of windows into his mind. In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) – a video installation that Gordon made with Philippe Parreno in 2006 – all the cameras used to make the work are trained on its subject, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, rather than the game itself. 

Gordon had begun this move towards exploring the inner world of other people in Feature Film (1999). In that work he concentrated his camera on the hands and face of a conductor. We do not see the orchestra. Gesture and facial expression are the only clues we have to what is going on in the conductor’s mind – all except, of course, for the music. This is the element that engenders those movements and allows us special insight.

Douglas Gordon (born 20 September 1966) is a Scottish artist; he won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the following year he received the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

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