No Other Artist Seems To Be Working Like This

Success certainly can be meteoric in the world of contemporary art.

I only became aware of the German-born painter Tomma Abts when I saw her work in the British Art Show in Newcastle in the autumn of 2005.

Abts's art didn't look like anyone else's in the exhibition because for all its visual impact it was so low keyed, so uninterested in calling attention to itself. Since then she's had a solo show. in London, but it was only her nomination for this year's Turner Prize that really raised her profile.

Abts paints abstract designs on identically sized canvases measuring 19in by 15in mostly in dull palette of olive greens and beiges. Some of these paintings look like a square inch of a Cézanne or a Cubist Picasso – geometric lines that overlap to create a shallow relief-like space, but little or no depth. It is impossible to follow a line or understand the relationship of one line to another because planes share edges. Some paintings look a little like the pleats in a folding fan. Others are like dressmaker's patterns – flattened shapes that you feel could be folded or sewn together.

Abts never allows emotion or representation to come into her work. But for all her cool and control, these paintings are fascinating to look at.

Unusually in the contemporary art scene, she deals with formal problems, treating each picture as a problem to be solved. As I wrote in my review of the show, it is hard to think of another artist anywhere in the world today who is working like this.

She is a worthy winner of the Turner Prize, and also, as both a woman and a painter, a real rarity. The question – one that arises whenever the prize is given to a young artist – is whether she will develop in an interesting way.