Turner Prize
Sarah Kent
Under the guidance of director Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward Gallery seems hell bent on reducing art to the level of fun for all the family. And as though to prove the point, cretinous captions strip the work of all meaning beyond the banal, while press pictures showcase kids gazing at large sculptures.Their latest exhibition, When Forms Come Alive consists of sculptures by 21 artists, all of whom employ organic rather than geometric forms. “Dynamic, exuberant and playful, the works in this show, take visitors on an adventure into a world of fascinating forms,” says Rugoff.The “adventure” begins Read more ...
Alice Brewer
Self-described ‘intermittent poet’ and 2023 Turner Prize-nominee Jesse Darling said this in a recent interview for Art Review: ‘I think about modernity as a fairytale’. The comparison is made in reference to capitalism’s beginnings, as continuous as they are ill-defined: ‘It’s a thoroughly arbitrary and weird situation that starts with the first colonial excursions in the 1700s – depending on where you begin – or the Inclosure Acts, and goes all the way up to now.’Paraphrasing an encounter with Darling’s sculptures, I would hedge my bets and add to fairytale the words romance, and maybe Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s incredible to think that the Turner Prize has been going for nearly 40 years. It was initially set up to generate interest in contemporary art by sparking debate. Not surprisingly, the media took this as an invitation to stir up controversy by focusing on work they considered shocking and this, in turn, encouraged artists to be provocative.These days, though, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting hot under the collar about art when there are more serious issues to worry about, like climate change, inflation, racism, sexism, the NHS and the self-inflicted wound of Brexit. And this more Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation. Poltergeist (main picture) and Doppelganger, the works that dominate Internal Objects, Rachel Whiteread’s powerful and moving new show at the Gagosian Gallery, imply isolation and are a vision of sheds destroyed, broken apart – structures that speak of a post-apocalyptic, unpeopled world. No home offices there.These are not her typical inside-out interiors cast in concrete, resin or steel, negative spaces Read more ...
Florence Hallett
While the Turner Prize shortlist can reasonably be expected to provide some sense of British art now, the extent to which British art can or should attempt to reflect a view of British life is surely a moot point. Art that is socially or politically engaged can all too easily tend towards the artless, its functionality placing it uncomfortably close to pamphleteering, with the certainties of propaganda drowning out the possibilities of art. Curious then, that the best of this year's four finalists are loosely united by an unmistakeable sense of life now, an engagement with the status quo that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.We were shown his career from work to work, interspersed with questions and answers between Gormley and Alan Yentob (pictured below, with Gormley), the presenter here diffident and attentive. Tim Marlowe, once connected with Gormley’s gallery White Cube (not referred to – the business of art did not get a look in, although we were told that Read more ...
fisun.guner
What’s going on? It seems the Turner Prize judges not only ran out of Scots to nominate this year, but actual artists. The socially enterprising architect-design collective Assemble don’t even call themselves artists so what must they make of the novelty of being shortlisted for the UK’s premier contemporary art prize? I’ve no doubt they’re delighted, especially since they appear favourites to win, but what a turn up. Perhaps far more of a novelty though, is the lack of Glasgow School of Art alumni. Scotland’s art colleges throw up Turner Prize winners and nominees as predictably as the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine if broadcasters thought the only living pop star worth giving air time to was Lady Gaga. Imagine – the horror. It would be wall-to-wall Gaga for the foreseeable future. And then imagine if the only living contemporary artist commissioning editors at Channel 4 and the BBC even bothered looking at was… Grayson Perry. Imagine. But wait. You don’t need to imagine – Perry has carved himself a big niche: as the go-to telly transvestite sociologist-cum-artist, fronting programmes trying to pin down the essence of Englishness, taste and class, and why critics seem to sneer at the type of Read more ...
fisun.guner
When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “conceptual” in “conceptual art” obviously need not apply. Walking through the mind-maze of this year’s exhibition of four shortlisted artists, particularly the work of Dublin-born Duncan Campbell, one feels at the mercy of a lot of portentous theorising. But that’s probably because Campbell seems to dominate the exhibition with a film, It for Others, Read more ...
fisun.guner
This year, if you don’t live in Ireland, you’ll have to take a plane or a boat to see the Turner Prize exhibition. But the effort will be nicely rewarded, for Derry (or Londonderry/Doire – wherever your affiliations take you) is a beautiful city, and it’s also the first UK City of Culture, so there’s plenty going on. And aside from the tempting premise of the exhibition, the building that’s been specially converted to house it is an inspired choice, not only because it makes for a very good exhibition space, but because it carries such symbolic weight. And such things count for a lot if you’ Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Is David Shrigley an artist?,” a journalist asked at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize shortlist announcement this morning. Well, many would say so, though The Arts Desk critic Judith Flanders had her own reservations after seeing his Hayward Gallery show, Brain Activity, for which he was nominated. “Just because the work’s funny, doesn’t mean it’s not serious”, was the short-shrift response of Tate Britain director and chair of judges Penelope Curtis. Her reply showed how seriously she was prepared to take the question.Some people were thrilled by these interactions, some decidedly Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When I visited Rachel Whiteread two years ago, there were two old sheds gathering dust in her basement as though waiting to be loved and put to use. Why was she cluttering up her studio with such large and intrusive objects, I wondered? “Things fester,” she told me by way of explanation. “I like to mull things over, so they might lie about for years. It’s to do with me noticing them; they need to relate to my train of thought and investigation. I’m drawn to things that are not too considered or self conscious like bathtubs, wardrobes and windows that are taken for granted as part of everyday Read more ...