Douglas Gordon’s new self-portraits series have an intimate dimension. It reflects the artist’s uneasy affinity for Andy Warhol which has often impacted the content and tone of his work. Warhol’s immortalized cultural icons here as charred, browned bits of commercial reproductions floating on mirrored backgrounds, singed remnants of the heroic originals that nonetheless possess an eerily powerful presence. In this series, Gordon added a new element, using a straightforward method of image transferring with acetone. The images were all sourced from the Chelsea area with an emphasis on the fifties and sixties time era. They create a shadow-like interference, reminiscent of a gone era, of London’s history, of one’s adolescent fantasies. Douglas Gordon’s portraits underscore Warhol’s phenomenal resonance in today’s art world, while capturing the self-reflexive nature of the post-Warholian period.​

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist who creates work that questions the complexities of memory and perception. Gordon works across a wide range of media including film, photography, text, and audio. Born in Glasgow in 1966, Gordon studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1984 to 1988 and continued his studies at Slade School of Art in London, graduating in 1990. He currently works and lives between Glasgow, Berlin and New York. Douglas Gordon’s new paintings utilise acetone printing to transfer provocative softcore images from early 1960s issues of Playboy magazine onto burnt, unlevelled, and asymmetrical canvases marked by biomorphic drips of wax, acrylic paint, and unknown liquids.

The transfers dilute the visibility and definition of the images to the point they become a semi-transparent superfluous tissue evaporating through the interlaced threads of the canvas that both consumes and materialises them. The new paintings juxtapose the cyclical movement of time conducted by the intermittent appearance and disappearance of the images with a sense of change and extension implied by the vague contours and positions of the canvases and the flowing drips of wax and paint. ​

Born in 1966 in Glasgow (Scotland), Douglas Gordon lives and works in Berlin (Germany), Glasgow (Scotland) and Paris (France). Gordon’s practice encompasses video, film, installation, sculpture, photography and text. Through his work, Gordon investigates the human conditions like memory, passage of time, ambiguity and the disruption of the normal as well as the binary nature and the tendency to split things into opposites: black / white, good / evil.​

Gordon’s work has been exhibited globally, in major solo exhibitions including at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark (2019), Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand (2018), Prisons of the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy (2017), K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2017), the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2014), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2013), the TATE Britain in London (2010), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), the National Gallery of Scotland (2006), the Hayward Gallery in London (2002) as well as the MOCA in Los Angeles (2001) and the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (1999). His film works have been invited to the Festival de Cannes, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Venice Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno, New York Film Festival, among many others. Gordon received the 1996 Turner Prize. In 2017, he presented I had nowhere to go at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.