Gordon was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied at Glasgow School of Art, 1984 - 1988 and the Slade School of Art, London, 1988 - 1990. He has won numerous awards including the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the XLVII Venice Biennale in 1997, and the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1998.

Gordon works in a varied selection of media. He has used performance, painting, installation, text and in particular, film, both original and appropriated from other sources, for his investigations into perception, memory and amnesia. For his first solo exhibition, at Tramway, Glasgow in 1993, he made what is now regarded as a seminal work, 24 Hour Psycho. It was the first time in which he used existing film footage, slowing down the famous Alfred Hitchcock film to a few frames per minute, with the result that it took an entire day to watch the film from beginning to end. Gordon has said of this work: "The viewer is pulled back into the past in remembering the original, then pushed into the future in anticipation of a preconceived narrative that will never appear fast enough."

In 2005, Gordon worked in collaboration with French artist and film-maker Philippe Parreno to produce Zidane, a feature length film portrait of the world renowned French footballer Zinedine Zidane. By using 17 synchronised cameras focusing solely on Zidane, Gordon creates a multidimensional space allowing the viewer to get an intimate insight into the movements of the famous athlete.

Gordon has exhibited extensively in Britain and internationally. He has had major solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, London, 2010; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1993 and 2000; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1995; Kunstverein Hannover, 1998; Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, 1999, and the Hayward Gallery, London in 2002. He has participated in numerous group shows including Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery, London, 1996, Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1998 and Intelligence: New British Art 2000, Tate Britain, London.

Made in Britain Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection 1980-2010,China federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation 2010. ISBN 978-7-5059-7014-4.

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

See in

  • Art Project