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17/10/2005

Turner Prize 2005

Tate Britain, London

The four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2005 are Darren Almond, Gillian Carnegie, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling. The Turner Prize 2005 is supported by the makers of Gordon's.

Last year, Gordon's increased the value of the Turner Prize to £40,000, with £25,000 being awarded to the winner and £5,000 each to 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 9 May 2005. 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 beginning on 18 October 2005. The winner will be announced at Tate Britain on 5 December during a live broadcast by Channel 4.

The members of the Turner Prize 2005 jury are:
Louisa Buck, London contemporary art correspondent, The Art Newspaper
Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Art Gallery
Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, art critic and Lecturer, Modern Irish Department,
University College Dublin
Eckhard Schneider, Director, Kunsthaus Bregenz
Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate and Chairman of the Jury

The artists:

Darren Almond uses sculpture, film and photography, and real-time satellite broadcast to explore the effects of time on the individual. Harnessing the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations, he produces works which have universal as well as personal resonances.

Ideas about memory permeate much of Almond’s work. The four-screen video installation shown here, If I Had You 2003, focuses on the personal memories of his widowed grandmother. Almond filmed her as she revisited Blackpool, where she had spent her honeymoon, for the first time since her husband’s death twenty years earlier. She watches a lone couple dancing in the famous Tower Ballroom. The soundtrack combines a gentle piano melody with sliding footsteps, discernible in each corner of the gallery. Their circular movement echoes the turning sails and creaking mechanism of an illuminated windmill from Blackpool’s promenade; Almond’s poignant metaphor for the reality of passing time and the inevitability of death.
Darren Almond, If I had you, 2003. Palazzo della Ragione, Milan. Produced by: Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan. Photo by: Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London), Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Gallerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

But, as always, Almond himself refrains from moral comment. As in his other work, such as the oversized mechanical flip-clocks, live-feed images of alien and empty locations, or bus-shelters transported from Auschwitz, we are left to respond to his powerful symbolism. Themes of love and memory engage us on a visceral level, emphasising human vulnerability: ‘the vulnerability of yourself against time.’

Gillian Carnegie works within traditional categories of painting - still life, landscape, the figure and portraiture - with a highly accomplished technique. Yet while apparently following the conventions of representational painting, Carnegie challenges its established languages and unsettles its assumptions.

Carnegie often works in series, returning to the same subject but varying her approach each time. Her ongoing series of ‘bum paintings’ are experiments in composition, light, colour and technique. In other works, Carnegie capitalises on the tension between subject and medium, her brush strokes both affirming and contradicting what they depict. In Waltz I 2005, part of her ongoing series of still lifes, the background drapery breaks down into broad, crude brushstrokes which threaten to overwhelm the carefully worked vase. In Section 2005 the eye is drawn back to the image surface through incongruous marks that seem to serve no descriptive function other than to confuse our perception of space.

Carnegie takes this complex interplay between subject and medium to an extreme in her series of black paintings. These night-time woodland scenes, constructed almost in relief from thickly applied paint, refer explicitly to Kasimir Malevich’s infamous Black Square painting of 1913. But Carnegie offers a retort to the macho, modernist tradition of the monochrome by planting a landscape at its heart. Despite her dingy palette and quiet imagery, her works have a charged energy that brings attention back to the personality manipulating the paint.

Carnegie has been nominated for her solo exhibition at Cabinet, London.

Jim Lambie takes the ephemera of modern life and transforms it into vibrant sculptural installations. Working with items immediately to hand, as well as those sourced in second-hand and hardware stores, he resurrects record decks, speakers, clothing, accessories, doors and mirrors to form sculptural elements in larger compositions. Lambie prioritises sensory pleasure over intellectual response. He selects materials that are familiar and have a strong personal resonance, so that they offer a way into the work as well as a springboard to a psychological space beyond.

Lambie’s works are often devised in relation to a specific space, where they are shaped by a series of intuitive and improvisatory decisions. This enables him to work in tune with the qualities of his materials and the parameters of the existing architecture.

Here, Lambie presents the latest in a series of hypnotic works made from vinyl tape applied to the floor.

Jim Lambie, Installation view, Shoulder Pad, Sadie Coles, London 2005. Courtesy of The Artist, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, Sadie Coles, London
Jim Lambie
Installation view, Shoulder Pad, Sadie Coles, London 2005
Courtesy of The Artist, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, Sadie Coles, London

Triangular shapes expand outwards from the corners of the room and are combined with areas of cross-hatched tape, an action Lambie describes as ‘shading’.

This work forms a kaleidoscopic platform for his sculptures: specially commissioned enlargements of bird ornaments, found in junk shops, are subjected to a characteristic process of customisation. The installation is named after sixties rock band The Kinks, whose silhouettes form the black Rorschach shape on the wall. Lambie’s prime concern, however, is the immediate encounter between viewer and work.

Jim Lambie has been nominated for his exhibitions at Anton Kern Gallery, New York, and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Simon Starling is fascinated by the processes involved in transforming one object or substance into another. He makes objects, installations, and pilgrimage-like journeys which draw out an array of ideas about nature, technology and economics. Starling describes his work as ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process’, revealing hidden histories and relationships.

For Tabernas Desert Run 2004, Starling crossed the Tabernas desert in Spain on an improvised electric bicycle. The only waste product the vehicle produced was water, which he used to paint an illustration of a cactus. The contrast between the supremely efficient cactus and the contrived efforts of man is both comic and insightful, highlighting the commercial exploitation of natural resources in the region.

Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2) 2005 has a similar circularity. Starling dismantled a shed and turned it into a boat; loaded with the remains of the shed, the boat was paddled down the Rhine to a museum in Basel, dismantled and re-made into a shed. Both pilgrimages, provide a kind of buttress against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism.

Starling’s new work One Ton, II 2005 focuses attention on energy consumption: the huge amounts of energy used to produce tiny quantities of platinum.
Simon Starling, Installation view : Tabernas Desert Run, The Modern Institute, Glasgow 2004.

Simon Starling has been nominated for his solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, and the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona.

Image: Jim Lambie, installation view, Shoulder Pad, Sadie Coles, London 2005
Courtesy of The Artist, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, Sadie Coles, London

Tate Britain, Linbury Galleries, Level 1
Millbank London SW1P 4RG
Closed 24, 25, 26 December (open as normal on 1 January)
Admission: £10 (concessions £8), open every day 10.00-17.50, last admission 17.00

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