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Lot Essay
Executed in 1992, Painting no. 74: Carl Andre and Painting no. 132: Robert Morris/Sonnabend stem from Douglas Gordon’s early series of paintings. Each panel references the title and date of a work by the artist in question: Carl Andre’s Silence in Münster (Frieden von Münster) of 1984 and Robert Morris’s Slow Motion of 1969. The series was conceived during the initial stages of a discussion with Declan McGonagle for the exhibition Guilt by Association at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Gordon had intended to curate a selection of works from prominent Irish and European collections alongside contemporary Scottish artists, yet the project was ultimately abandoned. His paintings were initially conceived as an extension of the proposed exhibition list; however, as the series progressed, Gordon began to mix and match names, dates and titles in a bid to disrupt the viewer’s cognition. ‘In a stance antithetical to the canons of high modernism’, writes Ross Sinclair, ‘these paintings are entirely somewhere else. They eschew the notion of the painting achieving a self-referential status, of it referring to nothing further than the parameters of the canvas’ (R. Sinclair, The Sociable Art of Douglas Gordon, Glasgow 1993, unpaged). Like the List of Names, Letters and Instructions that dominated Gordon’s early oeuvre, these paintings engage the themes of perception, memory and meaning that continue to define his practice.