Douglas Gordon

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Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, 1996

Douglas Gordon (born 1966) is a Scottish artist.

Gordon was born in Glasgow and studied art first there (at the Glasgow School of Art) from 1984-1988 and later at the Slade School from 1988-1990 in London. His first solo show was in 1986.

Much of Gordon's work is seen as being about memory and uses repetition in various forms. In one early work, Meaning and Location (1990), a passage from the Gospel of Luke is given with a comma in different places, thus subtly changing the meaning of the sentence. List of Names (1990-present) is a list of every person Gordon has ever met and can remember. One version of this is applied onto the wall of a stairwell in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Some of Gordon's works are related to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. 24 Hour Psycho (1993) is Hitchcock's film Psycho slowed down so that it lasts twenty four hours. Feature Film (1999) is a projection of Gordon's own film of James Conlon conducting Bernard Herrmann's score to Vertigo, thus drawing attention to the film score and the emotional responses it creates in the viewer. In one installation, this was placed at the top of a tall building, referencing one of the film's main plot points. He has also made a film about Zinedine Zidane (Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle).

Gordon has also made photographs, often in series with relatively minor variations between each individual piece.

Gordon won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the following year he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. In 2005 he put together an exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin called 'The Vanity of Allegory'. In 2006 there was an exhibition of his at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, called "Timeline"