With the major solo exhibition "Douglas Gordon" (19 November 2011–25 March 2012), the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst will present an artist who is one of the most important and most influential of his generation. While he gained renown above all for his films and large video installations, his oeuvre also comprises photographs, texts, sculptures and sound installations. Douglas Gordon (b. 1966 in Glasgow) has been a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2010. The MMK has in its possession one of Gordon's magnum opera—the video installation Play Dead; Real Time (2003)—as well as a number of other photo and video works. These holdings now form the point of departure for the first major survey in Europe since Gordon's presentation at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2007. Apart from installations rich in imagery, for example Straight to Hell and No Way Back (both of 2011) and recent additions to the Self-Portrait of You + Me series, the exhibition will also present three further large-scale video installations. The artist's latest work, Henry Rebel, carried out jointly with director James Franco and the young actor Henry Hopper, was premiered by the show. Henry Rebel is a major video installation executed this year as part of the Rebel project initiated by James Franco. All of the artists participating in the project realized works revolving around different aspects of Nicholas Ray's film Rebel Without a Cause of 1955. In the video installation to be featured by the MMK exhibition, Gordon interprets two scenes, which were part of the original screenplay but were never shot. For these scenes, they were fortunate in being able to cast Henry Hopper, the son of the late actor Dennis Hopper, who played in the original movie by Nicholas Ray. This is a circumstance which brings the inner logic of this highly complex masterpiece—in which Gordon records the young actor's performance on film—full circle. With his analyses of the images of our collective memory and everyday culture, Gordon exposes fundamental patterns of perception. His works frequently revolve around phenomena of doubling and mirroring: the couple, the double, light and dark, guilt and justice. Douglas Gordon won the Turner prize in 1996.
