Review: Turner Prize

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

Dexter Dalwood is (more or less) a traditional painter whose large scaled works merge politically motivated subject matter with a painterly Pop Art style. His recent solo exhibition at Tate St Ives revealed the rich depth and varied range of his approach to making paintings which draw upon art history as well as contemporary cultural and political events. When Dalwood was a student in the early 1980s, he produced a narrative approach to painting using references to famous 19th- and 20th-century paintings with scenes that depict real people and situations, such as, the death of weapons inspector David Kelly, the Greenham Common protest and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Angela de la Cruz, also creates a more or less socially acceptable approach to her art by deconstructing her minimalist canvases by partially removing them from the stretchers and creating sculpture from the carcuses. Her solo exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre, London utilized “The language of painting and sculpture to create striking works that evoke memory and desire through combining formal tension with a deeper emotional presence”.

Susan Philipsz’s work is far more emotional and visually it barely exists. She paints with sound and emotive melancholy.Her work at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and in Mirrors, Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain. Philipsz uses her own singing voice to create uniquely evocative sound installations that respond to the character of specific, often out-of-the-way spaces.The work installed at Tate Britain puts her work into a “Public Art context” and it works well

The Otolith GroupPresent their project A Long Time Between Suns, which took the form of exhibitions at Gasworks and The Showroom, London with accompanying publication. The Otolith Group work collaboratively across a range of disciplines, in particular the moving image, to investigate overlooked histories through archival and documentary material.

The Turner Prize award is forty thousand pounds with twenty five thousand pounds going to the winner and five thousand pounds each for the other shortlisted artists. The Prize, established in 1984, is awarded to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding 27 April 2010. It is intended to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art and is widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at Tate Britain opening on 4 October 2010. The winner will be announced at Tate Britain on 6 December 2010 during a live broadcast by Channel 4.