Douglas Gordon

... and his friends

18 October 2021 – 28 February 2022

Albion Barn is delighted to present ‘…and his friends’, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Douglas Gordon.

Gordon utilises a multimedia approach to mark-making; employing printing, painting, burning and transfer; occasionaly the kitchen sink. His ability to pull from all materials goes beyond the physical properties or reference of his research, as no iconography, cultural moment, or historical artefact is left unexploited. Gordon makes things by destroying things; he is just as unafraid to break down his idols as he is to worship them. Often pulling from existing cultural artefacts – from cinema or advertisements, science, religion, sport or the stars themselves – Gordon leans into the degradation suffered at the hands of time. His work is populated by ‘unforgettable images of the past’ – the barely remembered taste of… something undefined.

Gordon’s paintings are process rigorous, using a ‘primary school technique’ which also illustrates the explosively intimate relationships between Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and the progeny who are in the ‘dark room’ as it were – with all the connotations that come to mind. The canvases are burned, stained, and set upon with knives, needles, love and the necessity of keeping everything together – giving the fabric a metaphorical surface. Insisting on using the solvent transfer process, Gordon is appropriating the great appropriator, teasing Rauschenberg’s Inferno series out of the 20th century and into the ‘ancient present’. The dates may have changed but ‘the song remains the same’… the question is – what can modern-day allegory possibly mean? Despite entering an age dominated by visual culture, imagery has become increasingly fleeting and variably observed. There is no rigidity in the icons of the 21st Century as there were within the paintings of the old masters, rather, they float, ill-defined and porous. The ethereal shades of the collage allow for a transient relation between the viewer and the paintings. The audience must sketch in the ties that spin like an amphetamine web – across the canvas, across the room, and beyond.

The zealous way in which Gordon besets his canvases is more alchemist than artist. Taking his knife to the body items he has collected and endlessly duplicated with a scanner, there is something of a mad scientist about him in his Gothic leather apron. His work as divider, reconstituter, makes him both Frankenstein and monster, in a Jeckyl vs Hyde amnesty, as the duality of his mournful and hedonistic practice is realised. Fire returns throughout this body of work: Gordon burns through his studio like a fever.

Robert Burns, a key figure of Gordon’s youth growing up in Glasgow, is recurrent in ‘…and his friends’. As if to hold Burns up as an example of his unabashed re-appropriation of cultural iconography, Gordon has broken him in a work titled Black Burns – his notoriously punk attitude is not left outside of the studio. Gordon is keen to clarify, however, that it is not a sign of disrespect. He describes breaking the duplicate of the white marble statue by John Flaxman (an exact copy but for the fact it is in black) as an opening up. It is innately Scottish to have this familiarity with icons – often calling the poet ‘Robbie Burns’ – as a way of humanising what has been set in stone and raised above one’s head.