Last Blast

Doug Aitken

Working across photography, sculpture, multichannel video, and immersive installation, Doug Aitken illuminates the effects of our media-saturated culture; using the landscape as both subject and medium, he homes in on themes of industrial, urban, and environmental decline. Aitken is best known for installations that intervene in outdoor spaces. He projected his short film Sleepwalkers (2007), which stars actors Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, in separate frames across the façade of the Museum of Modern Art. For his Mirage project, installed in Gstaad, Switzerland, and Palm Springs, Florida, he created a mirror-coated, Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired home. Aitken has featured in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Serpentine Galleries, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the ​​Stedelijk Museum, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Centre Pompidou. In 1999, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. His work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, among others, and has sold for six figures on the secondary market.