On Monday evening the fashion photographer Mario Testino will announce the winner of this year’s Turner Prize, the most prestigious award in the British art calendar, at the Baltic arts centre in Gateshead. Named after the 19th-century painter JMW Turner, the annual award was set up in 1984. It goes to a British artist aged under 50 who is thought to have made an “outstanding contribution”, and is worth £25,000 (€29,000).
While it doesn’t have the cachet of literature’s Man Booker Prize, winning it can have a career-changing effect. Over the years the prize has generated controversy, notably when Tracy Emin was nominated for her unmade-bed installation in 1999, but there’s little controversial about the work of this year’s four shortlisted artists, all fairly sober, even innocuous, figures.
Karla Blackhas made a huge model of a landscape painting in the gallery, with cellophane clouds, a sugar-paper waterfall and various cosmetic products to entice the senses.
Martin Boyceis the bookie's favourite and his hard-edged, angular installation is like a piece of avant-garde interior design.
Hilary Lloydscreens filmed fragments of everyday reality via projectors and monitors distributed throughout the gallery.
The most traditional artist on the shortlist, George Shaw, makes meticulously realist paintings of the nondescript suburban and rural landscape around his childhood home in Coventry, using only enamel paint of the kind used on plastic model kits.
The Tate Britain director, Penelope Curtis, chairs the five-person jury. This year is only the second time that the prize exhibition hasn’t been held in London and, contrary to expectations, it has drawn record crowds.
