Turner Prize 2011 Shortlist Unveiled

The 4 artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2011 are Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw. – Read Review Of Turner Prize In Gateshead Here

The Turner Prize is a contemporary art award that was set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in British contemporary art. It is the most prestigious prize awarded in the UK. Previous winners include Susan Philipsz ,Richard Wright, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst. Love it or loathe it, the prize is always synonymous with controversy.

The prize is now going to alternate between Tate Britain and other centers around the country. This is to democratise the event and share it with the rest of Britain. This year the award will be held at The Baltic in Gateshead. In 2012 it will return to London for the Olympics’ year, and 2013 will see it travel to Londonderry, Northern Ireland as part of its city of culture celebrations. The controversial announcement that the Prize would alternate between Tate Britain and a gallery outside London, was made last September.

The prestigious Turner Prize 2011 will be mounted in the impressive BALTIC gallery in Newcastle. This is only the second time that the prize has been presented outside of London. In 2007 it was hosted by Tate Liverpool, ahead of the city’s tenure as European capital of culture.This departure from the Tate’s infrastructure will now transform the event into a democratic representation of Britain.

The jury for the 2011 prize has also been announced and lacks the usual presence of a critic. Chaired by Penelope Curtis, Director Tate Britain,the other jurors include, Katrina Brown, Director, The Common Guild, Glasgow; Vasif Kortun, Platform Garanti, Istanbul; Nadia Schneider, Director, Kunsthaus Glarus; and Godfrey Worsdale, Director, BALTIC.

The prize, which has been won by artists such as Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley and last year Susan Philipsz for her sound sculpture is internationally followed. Philipsz’s work is less about superficial appearance and more about the processes of swimming in the experience of sound. It was a popular choice and a departure from the usual disciplines.

The Turner Prize Nominated Artists Are:

Karla Black

This Glasgow based sculptor has been confirmed as Scotland’s official entry to the Venice Biennale this year which is curated by Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. Born in 1972 Black attended the Glasgow School of Art. Her works exist on different levels, the physical element of her work and her carvings giving them a tangible quality. Her academic references tackle weighty anthropological and cerebral themes. Black is nominated for her solo show at Galerie Capitain Petzel, Berlin, and for contributions to various group exhibitions, which together consolidated her innovative approach to sculpture and displayed her increasingly powerful works made with ephemeral materials.

Artist statement  – “While there are ideas about psychological and emotional developmental processes held within the sculptures I make, the things themselves are actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating. They are parts of an ongoing learning, or search for understanding, through a material experience that has been prioritised over language”. The finished work has a looseness and messiness that is allowed to exist within an overall attempt at simplicity, purity, cleanness or smoothness. The sculptures are rooted in Psychoanalysis and Feminism; in theories about the violent and sexual underpinnings of both individual mental mess, as in neuroses and psychosis, and the formlessness of specific points in art history, i. e. German and Abstract Expressionism, Viennese Actionism, Land Art, Anti-form and Feminist Performance.

Turner Prize 2011 - Karla Black

Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce’s sculptural work evokes a physical, urban landscape. It is both visionary and prophetic. He borrows from Modernist design history and incorporates design elements from Prouve to the Art Deco sculptural works of Jean and Joel Martel. The archetypes of certain periods evoke an industrial utopia and are of particular interest to Boyce’s sensibilities. His core interest is how objects come into the world, the ethos and politics with which they were produced, and what happens to them as they travel through time and space. Boyce is nominated for his solo exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, which built upon his project for the 53rd Venice Biennale by holding the viewer within an atmospheric sculptural installation. Boyce’s work combines references to design history and text and is marked by a subtle attention to detail.

Artist statement – It’s not an attempt to be radial, what I do follows the lineage of art history quite comfortably, but if the object is a bust or a figurative sculpture or a chair, I’ve ceased to see the difference, they’re all forms and shapes that encourage ideas and contain ideas. It’s more than context – it’s not that designing a chair and putting it in a gallery makes it art. It’s maybe quite subtle distinctions”.

Turner Prize 2011 - Martin Boyce

Hilary Lloyd

Born was born in 1964 in Halifax, UK. She studied Fine Art at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic and lives and works in London.

Lloyd is an artist who makes work which explores a range of subjects from roller skating to paint patterns left behind on a studio floor. Her theatricality off the street into the perceptual space of minimalism. In the course of this displacement, she isolates the structural features and ‘reverberative qualities’ of performing. She excludes all personal and biographical aspects of self-projection to bring out the basic spatio-temporal mechanics of theatricality.Her performances are casual, she preserves the moment of direct address that marks the presentation of the self in everyday life. Here work is almost architectural in construction using stills and realtime film to construct moving collages.

“As time passes you become aware of barely perceptible movements within each frame. What appeared to be a still life is in perpetual motion. Then there is the sound that grows and fades into the distance. It could easily be mistaken for the noise of the street outside but is in fact produced by a speaker behind the viewer”. She not only plays with digital projectors. Huge plasma screens, dvd players, speakers and even the poles that hold them in place are all exquisitely choreographed in groups of slightly menacing art-machines. The apparatus are so important and specifically chosen that they are enumerated in the description of the works. Lloyd is nominated For a solo show at Raven Row, London. The exhibition marked a step-change for the artist in terms of the ambition and scale of her project, which investigates the interrelation of moving image, sound and sculptural form in the portrayal of the urban environment.

Turner Prize 2011 - Hilary Lloyd

George Shaw

George Shaw was born in 1966 in Coventry UK and graduated with a MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London.He is based in Ilfracombe. Shaw is noted for his highly detailed almost Photorealist works which celebrate the mundane suburban landscape. His expansive body of painting. Working from photographs taken of and around his childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate, Coventry are at once familiar and unnerving. Unassuming buildings, patches of woodland, pubs, his school, the park, and the arbitrary details of urban infrastructure deposited by town planners, are the cast of a series of paintings ongoing since the mid-1990s. His favoured medium is Humbrol Enamel Paints a medium usually known for model painting. This lends his work a unique gloss appearance almost in faded Kodachrome. He is currently enjoying a highly-successful solo exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead. Shaw is nominated for his solo exhibition at BALTIC, Gateshead. Shaw’s paintings depict the area around his childhood home and are rendered exclusively in Humbrol enamel paint. With their deeply personal juxtaposition of subject matter and material, they lie intriguingly on the edge of tradition.

Turner Prize 2011 - George Shaw


The Turner Prize jury has produced the shortlist for the prestigious award for 2011. The prize is awarded each year to a British artist under the age of fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work, in the twelve months preceding. The prize is never without controversy.  The exhibition and prize giving ceremony will take place at the BALTIC in Newcastle. The Turner Prize has been  traditionally held in London it is internationally followed. This is only the second time in its history that it has been presented outside of the capital. In 2007  it was hosted by Tate Liverpool, ahead of the city’s tenure as European capital of culture. This is also the first time that it departs from the Tate’s umbrella. It will now annually alternate between Tate Britain and a Tate gallery in another UK city. This is to democratise the process and make the award more accessible to the rest of the country.
The Turner Prize continues to encourage debate about visual arts and I can think if of a better city to engage in the debate than Newcastle Gateshead – a city that has been transformed through culture and the arts. From The Angel of the North to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, the twin cities of NewcastleGateshead have gained an international reputation for culture and we continue to welcome visitors from across the globe who want to experience what the destination has to offer. ” ‘‘in its short history, Baltic has become recognised as a gallery where the ideas around new art can be interrogated, debated and engaged with at many levels, and its audiences continue to animate and increasingly inform that dialogue.

Dates to Remember

Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead opening on Friday 21 October 2011. The winner will be announced at BALTIC on Monday 5 December 2011.

Read More On The Turner Prize 2011

Watch 2010 Turner Prize Video

Gateshead Installs Turner Prize

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