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Born in 1966 in Glasgow.
Lives and works in Glasgow.
Gallery Website : www.yvon-lambert.com
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"Self-portraits of You + Me": With a title like this, this series of reworked photographs by Douglas Gordon just had to appear in the BIP 2012 selection!
Douglas Gordon is an internationally known Scottish artist, born in 1966 in Glasgow. His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including the Tate Liverpool (2000), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2000), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001); the MoMA, New York (2006), The National Galleries of Scotland, Edimbourg (2006), the San Francisco Museum of Art (2007), the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2007) and the Tate Britain, London (2010). Gordon was the recipient of the 1996 Turner Prize, the 1997 Venice Biennial's Premio 2000 award, the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 2008 Roswitha Haftmann Prize.
Gordon’s work, the best-known of which is 24 Hour Psycho (1993) or, more recently, the feature film, co-directed with Philippe Parenno, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, presented at Cannes in 2006, is extremely prolific. Far from restricting himself to video - even if it is a major part of his work – Gordon’s works also use performance, photography and text. The image (understood as both effective figure and mental representation) plays an absolutely central role in this. This involves reference to representations from mass culture (cinema and television in particular), without the "pop" aspect determining how his research is read. Gordon is a lot more interested; he bases his work on the shared references that twentieth century media has given us to see and to explore psychological mechanisms, the processes of perception, and the strangeness and the otherness contained in these props. Ultimately, the work of Douglas Gordon is based on identification and the lowest common denominator that this media and cultural material awakens in the audience so as to better destroy them, undermine them, and reconstruct a new relationship upon the debris. This relationship does not forget the historical and emotional charge of these representations, but queries it, bringing each viewer to face up to his responsibilities as "watcher" and "perceiver". Douglas Gordon's work seeks to bring the viewer to an unlikely and testing place, where common culture meets the singular of perception, psyche, the identity of each person and thus, the worrying uncanniness of "I is another ".
In the series presented here, the photographs are mutilated to better reveal the mirror to which they are stuck; the mirror obviously massacres the portrait and reflects the beholder. Who are the "You + Me" from the title? Is it Gordon himself proclaiming his status as creator via your reflection, and these figures of movie stars? Where are you in the piece? Are you the "You" or "Me" or the "+"? These disfigured faces, where the eyes ("mirrors to the soul") have disappeared, suddenly plunged into the blindness of their own fame, success, reputation, whose faces are they? The media of fantasies, daydreams and admiration become a medium of your reflection. It is your eyes that give depth to these emptied looks, yet the depth is not completely yours - it is a troubling narcissistic experience.
AFL
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