Douglas Gordon, Blind Star Series: Mirror Blind Errol, 2002. Photograph and archival museum Board, 66 x 61 cm. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, © Douglas Gordon

ZURICH.-The 2008 winner of Europe’s most valuable art award, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, is the Scottish video artist Douglas Gordon. The award ceremony will take place on 8 May in Kunsthaus Zürich.

The Board of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation will award the 2008 Roswitha Haftmann Prize (valued at 150,000 Swiss francs) to the Scottish video artist Douglas Gordon (*1966). Having started his artistic life as a photographer, Gordon has developed a unique mode of expression using video and film installations. Gordon, like Doug Aitken and Stan Douglas, is one of the leading figures amongst the mid-generation video artists. In 1996 he was awarded the Turner Prize.

Gordon has a predilection for dissecting, splintering and doubling images, or for turning them into their own opposites. At the same time, however, doubt has been his constant companion on the road to artistic success. He often plays a double game: by undermining the credibility of images created using modern media he unsettles the viewer’s faculties of perception. In his installations Gordon plays optical tricks on the viewer; existing film footage – with unexpected cuts – appears in completely new contexts and sound is used to arouse expectations that are either not fulfilled by the imagery or take on new associations. Gordon uses his art to explore themes such as temptation and fear, life and death, guilt and innocence. He draws his viewers in by demonstrating that their own lives are both volatile and contradictory.

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Douglas Gordon, Play Dead, Real Time, 22 Februay–30 March 2003, Exhibition view Gagosian Gallery 555 West 24th St. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, © Douglas Gordon