The Turner Prize, the esteemed Tate-run award for British artists, has revealed this year’s nominees, and in typical Turner Prize fashion, they’ve already polarized critics.
Simon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku are the four nominees for this year’s award, which once again comes with a £25,000 ($33,800) award for the winner. Facilitated by Tate Britain in London, the Turner Prize will this year stage a show of the nominees’ work at Teeside University’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, marking the first time the award has done its exhibition in an academic setting.
By the standards of past Turner Prize editions, this batch of nominees is tame—none of the artists are known for loud, scandalous work. That is exactly why some have already criticized this edition of the Turner Prize, an award that has historically been associated with divisive, controversial conceptual art.
In the Guardian, for example, critic Eddy Frankel wrote that the prize now represents “something way more appropriate for the age: a bit timid, a bit fearful, a bit safe.”
Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson spoke more positively of the nominees in a statement, saying, “This year’s selection presents a rich and diverse range of work, spanning installation and performance, and with a strong emphasis on sculptural practice. Each artist invites us into carefully constructed scenarios, both real and imagined, that offer distinct perspectives through which to explore the world around us, and to reflect on our place within it.”
Below is a quick look at each nominee.
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Simeon Barclay
Image Credit: ©Anne Tetzlaff/Courtesy the artist and Workplace Barclay is nominated for The Ruin, a performance staged at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire; and New Art Exchange in Nottingham. For that performance, Barclay contributed a spoken-word monologue about his upbringing in Huddersfield, while James Larter played percussion instruments and Isaac Shieh played the horn. Drawing on the artist’s Caribbean heritage, the piece “explores British identity, focusing on masculinity and class,” per its description on the ICA website.
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Kira Freije
Image Credit: ©Lewis Ronald Freije is also being recognized for work shown at the Hepworth Wakefield—in her case, a solo show presented within the museum’s galleries that opened in November of last year. Co-organized with Modern Art Oxford, the exhibition featured a new grouping of metal sculptures that often feature body parts viewed in isolation, along with drapes, pieces of furniture, and other items. Her sculptures are typically cast from individuals she knows well.
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Marguerite Humeau
Image Credit: ©Marguerita Humeau/Mathilde Agius/Courtesy the artist Humeau is by far the most internationally famous artist of the bunch, with her work shown in venues ranging from the Venice Biennale to the Palais de Tokyo in France, the country where she was born. Now based in London, she was nominated for a show held at the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and the Helsinki Art Museum that featured her large-scale sculptures, which envision creatures that belong either to a posthuman future or a distant past.
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Tanoa Sasraku
Image Credit: ©Jack Elliot Edwards/Courtesy the artist and Vardaxoglou Gallery, London Like Barclay, Sasraku was nominated for work staged at the ICA London. Sasraku’s contribution was an exhibition featuring installations about oil and all the histories surrounding its trade. The youngest artist nominated this year, Sasraku exhibited sculptures, works on paper, and film in an installation whose sparsity conveyed “both irony and seriousness,” per the Turner Prize jury.