It is Turner Prize time again, and this year, for only the second time in its 27-year history, the annual exhibition is being held outside London.
As if to chime with this temporary move to Gateshead’s wonderful BALTIC gallery, the four shortlisted artists are a resolutely non-London group, two of whom, incidentally, are from Glasgow.
Indeed Glasgow, and its 1990s Art School graduates, has been the story of the Turner Prize in recent years, with the two most recent winners, as well as two of this year’s nominees, former students. It all adds up to a Turner Prize that is stealthily moving away from the London-based YBA hype that surrounded its most controversial years.
The Turner Prize annually celebrates the four best exhibitions staged by British-based artists aged under 50. The jury changes each year, and so, therefore, do the parameters of the prize. This year’s shortlist is very strong by anyone’s reckoning, from the two Scots -- Karla Black, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale this year, and Martin Boyce, our Venice representative in 2009 -- to Ilfracombe-based George Shaw and Yorkshire video artist Hilary Lloyd (the only artist working in London).
So what of the work itself? Despite being referred to earlier this year as “Humbrol enamels versus bath bombs and lipstick” (Shaw paints vistas of the Coventry housing estate he grew up on in model-making paint, while Black “paints” vast sculptural installations in material more normally found in the bathroom cabinet), those looking for a lightbulb moment this year (and I’m referring of course to Martin Creed’s brilliant yet controversial Turner-winning Work No. 227: The Lights Going On And Off in 2001) to fan the flames of dissent will be disappointed. This, after all, is a list that includes two painters -- although far from traditional -- one of whom says he is “sometimes shocked” by his own conservatism.
Black, who might typically mix soil and industrial quantities of cosmetics in work that smells as good as it looks, makes exuberant, delicate, idiosyncratic and unique installations.
“She pulls together sculpture, painting and performance in seductive, gallery-filling forms with phenomenal use of materials,” says BALTIC’s chief curator, and curator of the Turner exhibition 2011, Laurence Sillars. “It provokes childlike responses.”
Shaw’s hypnotic work, Sillars adds, “brings an intriguing conceptual layering to what at first appears to be autobiographical record, but is actually very universal.” Boyce creates “a fascinating dissection of modernist history through design and art” in “incredible gallery landscapes”.
Lloyd, nominated for an exhibition at the Raven Row Gallery in which the multiple video projectors were as much part of the work as the film itself, works in real-time, unedited footage, from a bridge being built to paint splatters on a floor. “She questions how we interpret the images we’re bombarded with every day,” says the curator.
“Thematically, there is nothing that links them,” Sillars continues, “something which, I think, demonstrates the richness of the art that is being produced.” As to who will win, well, half of the fun of the Turner is in the debate, and this year it’s a very tough call. But with BALTIC just an hour-and-a-half away by train for southern Scots, there’s no reason not to give it your own two pennies worth before the official announcement of the winner in December.
Turner Prize 2011 is at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead from October 21-January 8, 0191 478 1810, www.balticmill.com
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