Gagosian Presents New Neon Works by Douglas Gordon

Maybe some words read better in neon—maybe some people look better under neon.
—Douglas Gordon

Gagosian is pleased to present a selection of neon works by Douglas Gordon. The works were produced by the onsite workshop that Gordon established in his exhibition at the gallery’s Davies Street, London, location in 2022, in which artisans worked to shape Murano glass tubing into short texts.

In his films, projections, installations, photographs, performances, and works in other mediums, Gordon investigates collective memory and our sense of psychological security through extreme distortions of time and space, often using his own work and that of other artists and filmmakers as raw material. He has made text-based works since the 1990s; most of these have taken the form of vinyl transfers applied to walls, but a few—the first being Empire, installed in 1998 in an alleyway outside a Glasgow pub—have employed neon light.

Gordon’s new neon works are autobiographical, but also spark nostalgia in the minds of many viewers raised in the same milieu; further, they resonate with the ways in which ideas and techniques are born, grow, and interconnect: “Because it’s a gas,” he has stated of neon itself, “and because it was discovered, not invented, it quickly became a byword or symbol for the very essence of discovery.” From seeing illuminated signs in old movies to observing the real thing in London’s Soho, Gordon was seduced by neon’s fusion of novelty and illicit glamor.

Each of the neon works in the exhibition has a “partner” (not on view) that completes a well-known line from a film or a lyric from a popular song. I second that emotion is taken from a song by Smokey Robinson that was covered in the 1980s by English new wave band Japan, and which was popular when Gordon was at school. I dont care I dont care has a dual reference, reproducing a line common to “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths and Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair.”

Finally, the exhibition acknowledges neon’s change in status from a common platform for commercial signage toward a rarified technology superseded by digital display. The gnomic verbal content of Gordon’s texts chimes with the alchemical nature of neon and its place in the history of modernism; the medium has a long and distinguished creative heritage, having been used by numerous artists, including Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, and Joseph Kosuth.

Douglas Gordon was born in 1966 in Glasgow, and lives and works in Berlin. Collections include Tate, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Timeline, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006, traveled to Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires); Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, British School at Rome (2007, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Between Darkness and Light. Works 1993–2004, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2007); Tate, London (2010); I am also ..., Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2013); Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2014); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); Documenta 14, Athens, and Kassel, Germany (2017); and In my shadow, Aros Museum, Aarhus, Denmark (2019). Gordon’s film works have been shown at the Festival de Cannes; Toronto International Film Festival; Venice Film Festival; and Glasgow Film Festival, among others. In 1996, he received the Turner Prize and the Kunstpreis Niedersachsen, Kunstverein Hannover. He was awarded the Premio 2000 at the 47th Biennale di Venezia (1997); Hugo Boss Prize (1998); and Käthe-Kollwitz Prize awarded by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2012). In 2012, Gordon became a Commandeur dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, awarded the title by the French Cultural Minister in Berlin on behalf of the French Republic.