Douglas Gordon (b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland) is an internationally acclaimed artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans video, film, installation, sculpture, photography, text, and sound. Known for his conceptual rigor and psychological depth, Gordon’s work explores themes of memory, morality, duality, and the disruption of perception. Using found footage, literary references, religious symbolism, and his own recordings, he probes the human condition through acts of distortion and repetition.

Gordon studied sculpture and environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art (1984–88) and earned his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1988–90), where he began engaging deeply with the cinematic medium. His breakthrough work, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), stretched Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film to a full day’s duration, dramatically altering its psychological impact and challenging viewers' relationship to time and narrative.

Binary oppositions—good and evil, light and dark, life and death—are central to Gordon’s work, often explored through haunting juxtapositions and conceptual subversion. In Three Inches Black (1997), a tattooed fingertip becomes a meditation on violence and intimacy. In Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake) (1997), he screens a film about divine revelation simultaneously with one about demonic possession, blending sacred and profane.

Gordon’s work has been widely exhibited in major institutions including MoMA New York, Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and ARoS Aarhus. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 14 (2017). He received the Turner Prize in 1996 and has also been recognized at major film festivals including Cannes, Venice, and Toronto.

“ There is something quite beautiful with the art thing, that you can only hold it back for so long and then you have to do it. „

—Douglas Gordon