Turner Prize shortlist – 2009 Turner Prize
The Tuner Prize 2009 shortlist is out.. have a look..
The shortlist for the 2009 Turner Prize has been announced, and the nominees are: Roger Hiorns, Enrico David, Lucy Skaer, and Richard Wright.
The nominated artists have six months to create work for a group show, which opens in October at Tate Britain, reports the Guardian. The winner, to be determined by a jury, will be announced at a ceremony in December. That artist will receive a £25,000 award; the three finalists each receive £5,000.
The Turner Prize began in 1984 and has established itself as the U.K.’s most prestigious art award. It is given annually to a British artist under the age of 50 in recognition of an outstanding exhibition within the past year.
Enrico David
Italian-born David, 43, works across mediums to produce highly stylized, graphic-led work that owes a lot to the theatricality of Art Deco and the Italian carnivalesque. The work is easy to engage with aesthetically, with clean, straight lines and blocks of color, yet the artist’s subject matter is far from sentimental or nostalgic, with frequent sexual and violent undertones.
Roger Hiorns
Any work that requires visitors to wear protective boots to view it is sure to make a lasting impression. This was the case with 34-year-old Hiorns’s 2008 installation Seizure, in which the artist covered the entire interior of a small, soon-to-be-demolished social housing flat with copper sulphate. This, in turn, crystallized blue, creating a grotto at once magical and disturbing. Central to the artist’s practice is a study of the physical versatility of materials, as when he ground a passenger jet engine into sculptural piles of dust in an untitled 2008 work.
Lucy Skaer
Skaer, 34, the only woman on the shortlist, sources her initial subject matter from newspaper, magazine, and book imagery. She then works and reworks the aesthetic components of these pictures (colors, shapes) into intriguing, sometimes dark, diagrammatic forms that appear in paintings, sculptures, and films — or in installations combining all three. In doing so, she converts her subject matter from the easily recognizable imagery of the found pictures into an exploration of the difficulty of comprehending abstract forms.
Richard Wright
Wright, 39, is the most established of the shortlisted artists, with representation by Gagosian Gallery and works in MoMA, Tate, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego collections, among others. His trademark is to apply geometric patterns of paint or gold leaf directly onto gallery walls, resulting in works that heighten the viewer’s awareness of the architecture of a space while contrasting the building’s permanence with the temporary nature of the art.
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