The prestigious Turner Prize has just been awarded to Martin Boyce at the BALTIC gallery in Gateshead, and this is the “a quietly atmospheric, lyrically autumnal installation” that won it. The 43-year-old can now proudly strut around as the hottest British artist under 50. Not so lucky: his fellow nominees George Shaw, Karla Black, and Hilary Lloyd.
The Glasgow-based artist’s award winning exhibition at Gateshead has drawn more than 100,000 visitors since October. What do you think of these nature-inspired forms, beloved by the judges? Are you moved by his “modernist garden” with triangle leaves and “sparse, intelligent sculptures”? Does it inspire “a new sense of poetry” in you? Check out everyone’s work after the jump, and let us know who you think should have won in the comments.
Aside from kudos, Boyce has won 25,000 pounds ($39,220) and bragging rights along such prior Turner prize winner celebrities as Damien Hirst (1995), Steve McQueen (1999), and Antony Gormley (1994).
Martin Boyce
Image credit: The Modern Institute via Studi0 International
Martin Boyce is a modernist-influenced installation artist who fashions artificial nature from geometric, minimalist, neon light arrangements, wire fences, grills, and metal structures. His work is described as “a romantic and melancholic vision of nature, which extends to the city’s built environment.”
Karla Black
Image credit: Portalen Portalen
You could say that Glasgow-based artist Karla Black makes land art within a gallery. She constructs precarious, large-scale installations of sugar paper, bath bombs, semi-translucent drapery, and other everyday substances, arranged as intimate notes of tactile memory — what the Saatchi Gallery identifies as “the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges.”
George Shaw
Image credit: I’m Not Karen Carpenter
George Shaw is landscape painter, but his pastoral scenes are detailed images of an urban wasteland of shattered red brick and neglected streets, of aesthetically graffitied walls and serene, ominous, boarded-up storefronts.
Hilary Lloyd
Image credit: This Is Tomorrow
Hilary Lloyd’s video works are based on sequential instances — a DJ spinning, a man undressing. Her presentation method is exposed — audio-visual materials in plain view, wires dangling — and the set up works to “compel a physical dimension to the act of looking.” The projectors, they’re looking. They’re looking at the same thing, over and over. Meta?
Main image via Art Observed.