Turner Prize shock … nominated artists can draw and paint

Published on Tuesday 28 April 2009 23:00

JUDGES picked artists who draw and paint for this year's Turner Prize yesterday, in a move that startled the art world.

Two of the four nominees for the 25,000 prize, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright, live and work in Scotland, and the nominations were seen as a fresh public endorsement of the thriving contemporary art scene north of the Border.

For years, the Turner has been a lightning rod for critics of contemporary or conceptual art, attacked as far removed from what most people think of as art. Last year's choices were seen as particularly obscure.

But art critic Jonathan Jones, one of the judges, said yesterday: "All four draw or paint. Three are artists for whom drawing and painting are at the centre of what they do."

The English artist Richard Hiorns and the Italian-born, London-based surrealist Enrico David were also named.

"It is art in the sense that most people would be able to recognise as art, and most people could see that these are talented artists," Mr Jones said.

"It gets beyond 'this is a piece of rubbish in a corner', because none of these artists do that ready-made work."

A lot of people found last year's list "impenetrable and indigestible", he said.

Skaer and Wright are both based in Glasgow, where the Glasgow School of Art has helped to produce a string of rising stars, but the judges nominating them yesterday cited their shows in high-profile Edinburgh galleries.

Skaer is represented by leading private Edinburgh gallery Doggerfisher. Nominated partly for a show at the city's Fruitmarket Gallery, she spends weeks working on elaborate drawings of whales or warships, as well as using "found" photos.

Doggerfisher's Susanna Beaumont said she was "excited and delighted" at the choice of Skaer. Another Scottish artist she represents, Nathan Coley, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, while Charles Avery was also considered for this year's list, judges said.

"It's the art schools, it's the infrastructure, it's the Scottish Arts Council, the grants and residences," Ms Beaumont said. "There's a supportive community, which is important."

Skaer had received Scottish Arts Council funding for two residencies in New York and Amsterdam, she said.

Wright was cited by Turner judges yesterday partly for his work at Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery. He paints detailed "interventions" on walls, windows or alcoves of private homes and galleries in geometric designs.

His work is typically painted over when an exhibition ends, as it was in a flat he filled with his art for the Edinburgh International Festival two years ago.

The Turner Prize is awarded to an artist under 50. An exhibition of the shortlisted artists' work opens in London in October, with the decision in December.

Simon Groom, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: "Scotland has always been strong for contemporary art, but in the past they might have felt they had to leave."

Scottish galleries, from the Ingleby to the Fruitmarket and the National Galleries, have shown they "really can consolidate what an artist does," he said.

"It is part of that new confidence, and the recognition that there is a hell of a lot going on up here. Major shows are coming to Scotland, including Artist Rooms", based on the D'Offay collection of contemporary art.

Neither Wright or Skaer was the bookies' favourite yesterday, however. That position went to Hiorns, who became famous when he converted a derelict London flat into a cavern of sparkling blue crystals, using thousands of gallons of liquid copper sulphate to coat the walls.

RICHARD WRIGHT

BASED in Glasgow, Richard Wright moved to Scotland with his family as a child. While he now works world-wide, particularly in America, the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow gave him his first solo show in 1994.

Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones described him as "the thinking person's graffiti artist". Wright typically paints directly on to walls or ceilings, and his work is usually painted over at the end of an exhibition, although it is also featured in major galleries including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Turner Prize judges saw comparisons in Wright's work with Islamic art, in his fascination with geometry and mathematics.

Wright, 49, was nominated for work he showed in Pittsburgh and at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. His subtle wall paintings are said to respond directly to the architecture in which they are created.

In 2007 he spent three weeks creating a work for the Edinburgh International Festival in a London Street apartment.

LUCY SKAER

LUCY Skaer, 34, is based in London and Glasgow.

Born in Cambridge, she graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1997, and held her first major exhibition in the city's Transmission Gallery in 2001.

In 2007, Skaer was one of the artists chosen for Scotland's pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Her work includes hugely detailed drawings, sculptures and films which often take "found" photographs as their starting point.

She was nominated for her solo exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and her show "A Boat Used as a Vessel", at the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland.

"She's not traditional, but she's comprehensible," said James Knox, editor of the Art newspaper.

Her Basel show features a whale skeleton, partly hidden behind white screens, and her drawings of the skeleton, which have been created on the same scale.

"The drawing's done in a fragmented and dark way, so it felt like you were seeing it through water," said Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones.

ROGER HIORNS

ROGER Hiorns, based in London, created a sensation with his 2008 exhibition "Seizure", for which he was nominated yesterday.

He filled a derelict apartment in an abandoned 1960s London housing block with liquid copper sulphate which gradually encrusted every surface with bright blue crystals.

"He is in a way a modern alchemist," said Turner Prize jury member Andrea Schlieker.

She added: "He uses ordinary materials from liquid detergent to perfume to fire and turns them into something magic and wondrous." Seizure was a site-specific work, so the question of what the 34-year-old artist will produce for the Turner Prize exhibition remains under discussion.

ENRICO DAVID

ENRICO David, aged 43, is based in London. Born in Ancona, Italy, he was nominated for his solo exhibitions How Do You Love Dzzzzt By Mammy? in Basel, and Bulbous Marauder, right, at the Seattle Art Museum.

The surrealist creates rich paintings, drawings and sculptures which are described as disturbing as well as beautiful. His work Chicken Man Gong, from 2005, was a cross between sculpture and musical instrument, as its title suggests. Prize judge Jonathan Jones said David's work reminded him of Pablo Picasso. "His work is about sexuality, and sexual identity, his own childhood," he said.

One shining light among the 'maverick meditation on senselessness' that is the Turner Prize

LAST year, I suggested it was time for the Turner Prize to hang up its boots and retire, writes Duncan MacMillan.

I am not sure that this year's shortlist suggests I need to revise that opinion.

Of the four nominees, Richard Wright and Lucy Skaer are both Glasgow-based. That should give us an interest, but we have been there before with others of the contemporary Glasgow school nominated for the Turner Prize.

As a group, they may be tuned into what, in their wisdom, the Turner Prize judges think is good. However, the melancholy history of their judgments in choosing and awarding the prize in the past is more of a health warning than a recommendation.

Richard Wright makes precious and self-important "interventions" in buildings.

Lucy Skaer does equally inconsequential things with photographs. I like Frieze magazine's comment on her work: "Lucy Skaer's drawings, films and sculptures transform images of prisons, dictionaries, museums and whales into maverick meditations on senselessness and beauty."

You can leave out the beauty, but a "maverick mediation on senselessness" encapsulates the history of the Turner Prize rather neatly.

That whole sentence also indicates how these artists get by. Their art is mostly an empty space eagerly waiting to be filled with meaningless words by impressionable but empty-headed art administrators.

The other two artists are London-based. They are also a bit more positive in the images they make.

Enrico David is a latter-day Surrealist, though that does mean he spends a lot of time revisiting other people's ideas.

Roger Hioms is much more interesting than the others, however. He really does create things that you might want to see.

I didn't see it, but I wish I had seen the brilliant blue cavern of Seizure, the room lined with copper sulphate crystals that Hioms created in London last year.

&#149 Duncan MacMillan is art critic for The Scotsman.