Douglas Gordon and the cinema as art

Douglas Gordon is one of the most important artists who enrich our current art world - and above all the art market. He can currently be found on the "World bestseller list of artists" by artfacts.net

Do you love cinema, well -made films, drama, still captivating and still unmatched classics of the film world, also weird experiments with the medium, canvas or video? Then Douglas Gordon is actually "her" artist:

What does Douglas Gordon do for an art?

Douglas Gordon deals with passion, with conceptual media art, when his work also touches many other areas of visual art: Douglas Gordon also artistically works artistically, he makes texts into works of art, and he also likes to operate as a draftsman and painter.

Since the mid -1980s, Gordon has mainly made a name for itself with his video installations, film art projects, audio art and pictures . The jury, which Gordon awarded the Roswitha Local Prize in 2008, stated:

The aesthetic brilliance and the emotional force of his video work are in no way inferior to his role models - especially the films of Alfred Hitchcocks "

The world in which Douglas Gordon was born

Douglas Lamont Gordon was born on September 20, 1966 in Glasgow as the son of Gordon Brown (no, not the former UK Prime Minister, although he was also born in Glasgow, Douglas Gordon's father was a carpenter) and Mary Clements Gordon.

He grew up with three siblings, and from his childhood and youth it has been handed down that Gordon was one of the first enthusiastic consumers the mass media that began in the 1970s of the last century to take up increasing importance in everyday life.

Anyone who looks at Douglas Gordon's work quickly learns that these early experiences have artistically shaped him.

This is how Douglas learned Gordon Art

After graduating from high school in 1984, Douglas Gordon went to the time-honored Glasgow School of Art, where he studied for the Bachelor of Arts until 1988, for the further degree of master's degree he left Glasgow and moved to London, where he graduated from the Slade School of Art 1990.

The choice of this training center testifies to perspective, self -confidence and quality awareness: The Slade School of Fine Art is the art school of the University of London, a college of London, which is one of the largest colleges in the UK and one of the most respected.

The University College, together with the Unis Oxford and Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science and Imperial College London, forms the G5, a group of super elite universities, and the UCL is in second place and thus before Oxford.

The art school of this college is of course also one of the most important British art schools, but the Slade School is also known internationally as a leading training center for artists.

In any case, this training center was a good choice, the Slade has already produced many famous artists, Martin Creed and Antony Gormley, Richard Hamilton and Mona Hatoum, William Turnbull and Rachel Whiteread, to name just a few, and design legend Eileen Gray and co -founder of the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) Mary Quinn Sullivan also have their knowledge of art on this Institute acquired.

When and why was Douglas Gordon famous as an artist?

Douglas Gordon was also able to climb the head of the artistic success quite quickly, in 1990 the degree was, from then on Douglas Gordon exhibited in the "Transmissions Gallery" in Glasgow and will quickly know internationally internationally.

In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition, and in 1993 he also presented the work that will be considered the trademark of his work from now on: At that time, the video installation "24 Hour Psycho" a sensation, in which Gordon Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" runs as a 24-hour slow motion version and without sound over the screen.

When it comes to the idea of ​​reducing the film to two images per second, Douglas Gordon came in a rather drunk state, it is occasionally claimed ... Gordon simply says the truth about how he came up with the idea of ​​this video installation: he always wanted to make a film, but like most young people did not have the money for it.

Gordon floated a "somehow epic" film, and in his situation it seemed as a good idea to use an existing film.

The fact that the Hitchcocks “Psycho” became a coincidence was a coincidence born. Gordon was visiting his family for Christmas, bored, the television had a broadcast, nobody wanted to go out on a drink with him. So he looked at the existing video of Hitchcock's "Psycho" , began to play around with the statue function and slow motion, and a work of art was already in the emergence ...

And this work of art was so well received that the alienation and manipulation of existing or specially made film material becomes the main topic on Gordon's main topic, which he knows to interpret in a surprising way: in 1994 Gordon in "Something My Mouth and Your Ear" at the time he spent in his mother before his birth - and on his experiences - The hits that the expectant Gordon had heard from January 1966 to September 20, 1966 are played in a dark room of all-round loudspeakers installed in a dark room of all-round.

It continues in this style and with a lot of attention, until the turn of the millennium Douglas Gordon can show around 70 solo exhibitions and around 40 individual exhibitions in most important art centers in the world.

Douglas Gordon's artistic triumphal march

Douglas Gordon can quickly take the art assessors of this world for himself, in 1996 he was awarded the estimated Turner Prize of the London Tate Gallery , in 1997 he was seen Biennale di Venezia "Premio 2000" , in 1998 the Hugo Boss Prize of the New York Guggenheim Museum .

And again and again he inspires the people where film art is in the foreground: in 1997 the video installation "Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake)" , in which Gordon paired one of the primeval creations of the mystically darkened horror film and an epic historical drama with a religious background.

The exorcist of William Friedkin (1973) collides with the film drama "The Song of Bernadette", which director Henry King (snow on the Kilimanjaro, Bravados, 1950s) created in 1943 after Franz Werfel's novel on the life of St. Bernadette. In Gordon's work of art, the films are projected on both sides of a semi -transparent canvas, where they meet mirrors upside down and thus create effects that William Blake, as old master of painted natural mysticism, would have enthusiastic.

In 1998 Gordon had the idea of ​​staging the cinema icon "The Searchers" (The Black Falcon) by John Ford, in 1956, "somewhat more literally": he relates the duration of the film act, 5 years, in the duration of the film in life-in the 113-minute film you can see how John Wayne needs five years to track down a kidnapped child.

Douglas Gordon's video installation is almost seven weeks, and this is not a random length, but is precisely calculated: Gordon puts the length of the film act in relation to the length of the installation, a single-image projection of approximately 6 hours, shown over 47 days, corresponds to the film length of 5 years.

In 1998 he received the Central Kunst Prize, awarded by the Cologne Art Association and the Cologne health insurance of the same name, which, in addition to the prize money of 75,000 euros, gave the award winner a half -year stay in Cologne, and there the implementation of an art project with a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein.

In 1998 Douglas Gordon exhibited in Tel Aviv and goes to Berlin as a guest of the DAAD, he got to know two places in one year, to which he will develop a sustainable relationship, in Berlin he had already brought it to a solo exhibition in the new National Gallery in 1999.

In 1999 Gordon made his first own film, "Feature Film" will again be dealing with a Hitchcock film with Vertigo. Here Gordon takes the memorable film music of the masterpiece, has it re -imported by the Opera National de Paris orchestra and films face and hands from chief conductor James Conlon with several cameras and from a wide variety of perspectives during this recording.

The connection of the captured images with the well -known tone and the plot of the film classic is left to the imagination of the recipient.

In 2000 the "Douglas Gordon: Feature Film" is shown in the Royal Festival Hall in London, and he also has individual exhibitions in Paris ("Croque-Morts", Yvon Lambert; "Sheep and Goats", Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris), Liverpool ("Douglas Gordon", Tate Liverpool) and Toronto ("Double Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon", The Power Plant). He remains in Canada, a retrospective in the Vancouver Art Gallery, in 2001 Douglas-Gordon retrospectives also take place in the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.

Now Douglas Gordon is really "in" , between 2001 and 2006 he is in Baden-Baden, Barcelona, ​​Bregenz, Champagne-Ardenne, Edinburgh, Esslingen, Folkestone, Kent, Karlsruhe, Copenhagen, Krakau, Leipzig, London, Los Angeles, Munich, New York, Nizza, Paris, Pittville (UK), Seoul, Tape (Japan), Twentynine Palms (California), Vancouver and Washington DC, seen in group exhibitions or individual positions - several times in some of these cities.

In 2005 Gordon was again in Berlin, where he presents his work of art "Staying Home and Going Out" in "The Vanity of Allegory" ("Vanity of the Semonic Representation"). The exhibition is organized by the German Guggenheim, a cooperation between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Douglas Gordon already deals with the topic of self -reflection here in more than prominent society. B. Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp , Federico Fellini, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Damien Hirst , Jeff Koons, Stanley Kubrick, Man Ray , Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner with works around the represented transient vanity.

We continue to Italy in 2006 (Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), Spain (Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona) and Scotland (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) and again to New York, where a big solo exhibition begins with "Timeline" in the Museum of Modern Art. In 2006 he also showed his film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, made on Art Basel together with the French filmmaker Philippe Parreno.

The two portrays football star and international Zinédine Zidane without words: 16 high -speed cameras, strong zoom lenses pursue Zidanes across an entire league game from the edge of the field and the highest rank. Only Zidane, the course of the game remains unclear, it is about movement and movements, about facial expressions and gestures of Zidanes, a unique and puzzling portrait.

In 2007, the solo exhibition "Between Darkness and Light" in the Wolfsburg Art Museum took him, in 2008 he picked up the Roswitha Local Prize in Zurich.

Exactly 10 years after his first stay, Douglas Gordon came back to Berlin in 2008, the creative, unexcited climate of the city and the healthy green area he likes so much that he takes his third place of residence here (next to Glasgow and New York).

Does Douglas Gordon still do something except film works of art?

Of course, as I said, he also deals with conceptual text work. In "List of Names" he listed all the people he had met until 1990, the list from 1990 contains 1440 names, it is to be continued.

He processes historical found footage material (uncut film material) and painted images in his video installations (Hysterical, 1994/95, 10 MS-1, 1994) and he uses artistic photographs in installations, "Everything is nothing with its reflection-a photographic pantomine" (2013) is made up of 360 individual objects.

A lot honored and a lot collected - world artist Douglas Gordon

In addition to the already mentioned (Turner Prize, Hugo-Boss Prize, "Premio 2000", Central Kunst Prize and Roswitha Legking Prize), Gordon 2012 receives the Käthe-Kollwitz Prize of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. In 2008 he was given a very consistent honor - jury president Wim Wenders appointed Gordon to the jury of the 65th Film Festival in Venice .

Today Douglas Gordon is at the forefront in every list of successful artists, and his works can be seen in many public collections, in many countries: in the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in the Goetz, Munich Collection, in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt and in six locations in France (Avignon, Montpellier, PuteAux and three times in Paris).

Two public collections in Canada (Ontario and Vancouver) and two in Austria (Maria Enzersdorf and Vienna) have “one Gordon”, one in Italy (Naples), in the Netherlands (Amsterdam), one in Norway (Oslo) and one in Portugal (Alcoitão). Gordon is represented in Switzerland (Zurich), in the USA (Los Angeles), in England (London) in important public collections, and in his home country Scotland, art -loving citizens can admire him twice, in Edinburgh and Glasgow (Scotland), only his new home Berlin could not yet work here ... view.

What does a artwork from Douglas Gordon cost?

In the size of the living room and not as the world only unique, affordable sums: from Douglas Gordon's work "Staying Home and Going Out", which was seen in the exhibition "The Vanity of Allegory" in the German Guggenheim exhibition in 2005, there is an edition to buy. "Staying Home and Going Out" shows the artist himself, in double disguise, in "Staying Home" with black and in "Going Out" with a blond wig, and the 100 polaroids recorded for this work show a constantly changing picture. Gordon is sensual and angry, exhausted and shy, challenging and curious - you get "pure" gordon, in many unique moments that (maybe) result in the true picture of the artist.

The Edition No. 32 consists of polaroid prints 7.3 x 9 cm, 100 unique pieces in two series of 50 copies, dated and signed, series "Staying Home" with black wig and series "Going Out" with blond wig, at a price of 400 euros. This edition No. 32 Distributes the German Guggenheim in its museum shop Unter den Linden 13-15, 10117 Berlin or at www.deutsche-guggenheim.de/ .

The artist Douglas Gordon in everyday life

The great passions of Douglas Gordons are actually film and football, just as his art suggests. That is why Gordon is showing his Zidane film on time for the European Championship in Berlin, and that's why he was so enthusiastic about being appointed to the jury of the Film Festival of Venice in 2008-Gordon, according to his own statement, has been behind him when he was more of a time after the birth of his son, "Charlotte's Web" and "Finding Nemo" Was, he was really looking forward to seeing "real cinema" again.

When Douglas Gordon does not "make art", he may sit in a café in Berlin-Mitte, drink Earl-Gray-Tea and lets the temporary admire his numerous tattoos.

Or he writes to his catering column in the French "Playboy", or plays a round of golf, in Berlin or in Scotland.

Gordon says of himself that after the success of "24-hour psycho" he discovered a desire to best slow everything down for the rest of his life, and that he was partly able to do exactly that. With his art he would like to raise questions - open questions that are already present in the minds of the people and to which he himself "definitely does not want to give any answers".