Spin Events
Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural
Blind Star Series: Mirror Blind Greta, 2002 (c) Douglas Gordon. Photograph by Robert McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
Royal Scottish Academy Building, Edinburgh
30 November 2006, 6-7.30pm
_‘I provide the board, the pieces and the dice, but you are the ones that have to play.’_ Douglas Gordon
For our final Spin: Edinburgh event of 2006, we will be visiting the much-anticipated retrospective exhibition by Douglas Gordon, one of Scotland’s most celebrated contemporary artists. And it doesn’t disappoint.
The Royal Scottish Academy Building has been transformed beyond recognition with specially constructed blacked-out spaces, TV monitors and installations where the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Superhumanatural is Gordon’s first retrospective exhibition to be held in Scotland and features key works including 24 Hours Psycho (1993), Through a Looking Glass (1999) and 30 Seconds Text (1996).
Born in Glasgow in 1966, Douglas Gordon was among a number of Glasgow-based artists who embraced a more conceptually-orientated art in the 1990s. His deployment of pre-existing material, most notably in his use of Hitchcock’s iconic film in his work 24 Hour Psycho, attracted particular attention. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1998. Earlier this year, he had a mid-career survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Working in video, film, photography, audio and text-based works, he explores themes of trust, guilt, confession, deception and doubling. Many of his works are based on dichotomies – good and evil, life and death, birth and death, perception and memory and seduction and violence.
This is a great opportunity to see a major exhibition of his work. We will be joined by Keith Hartley, curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator and Deputy to the Director at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Keith, who was the exhibition curator, has been working on the show for a few years and will be able to provide us with a fascinating insight into the works and the man himself.