The Financial Times, feature by Jan Dalley
2006
It is a triumph for paint and a triumph for women artists. The 38-year-old Tomm Abts is only the third woman to have won the Turner Prize in its 22 years of existence. At last night's lavish celebration at Tate Britain, the German-born painter carried off £25,000 and a significant career boost – the first presented by Yoko Ono and the second conferred by the reputation of Britain's most prestigious art prize.
This was a year in which critics wondered whether the Turner Prize could keep up its annual quotient of shock value. It has become a crowd-pleaser, in the better sense, with plenty of razzmatazz to counteract the scary cathedral hush of high contemporary art. And it has been rewarded with huge popularity. But it could be said to be running out of ways to be controversial. Those questions about "is it art?" have thankfully been consigned to the dustbin of tired old arguments, yet this year's winner is by far the least controversial of the contenders.
On a well-balanced shortlist of four, the only real show-off piece was an interactive work by Phil Collins, "The Return of the Real," – hours of sometimes compelling videotape showing the so-say victims of so-called reality television. Along with this – the first "social process" work in the history of the prize – came sculptor Rebecca Warren and installation artist Mark Titcher. Each of the three runners up is awarded £5,000; the total £40,000 fund is supported by Gordon's Gin.
Tomma Abts' painterly work is eerily abstract, each small canvas exactly the same size, unshowy, finely worked. She builds up acrylic and oil paint by layering and over-painting into visual conundrums, a series of diagonals, rhomboids, swirls and anti-perspectives that play tricks with our perception. Sometimes the surface appears almost enameled, sometimes the build-up of paint leads to a three-dimensional effect of folds and distances, of relief maps, of interiors designs, of origami, of calligraphy that we cannot read.
A safe choice, on the whole, and the bookie's favourite. In fact, if there was controversy this year, it was more about the judging process than the candidates.
One of the panel of five, journalist Lynn Barber, broke ranks and published a frank account of her experiences, while an application under the Freedom of Information Act meant that e-mails and other private messages between the judges also reached the public print. The other predictable rumpus came from the Stuckists, a group of painters who routinely make noisy protest against the "Tate mafia" and its preference for conceptual art. Their spokesman this year held that the Turner Prize "has yet again managed the amazing achievement of finding the most vacuous work in British art."
Few people who studied the cool and fascinating work of Tomma Abts will agree. Next year, for the first time, the Turner Prize will be held in Liverpool, a city which is to be 2008's European Capital of Culture. Presumably, the Stuckists will go, too.