2006
In 2006, Tomma Abts became the first female painter to win the prestigious Turner Prize organized by Tate Gallery in London. The award was based on recent exhibitions, including a major solo presentation at Kunsthalle Basel in 2005. The jury, composed of Lynn Barber, a writer for The Observer, Margot Heller, director of the South London Gallery, Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator at White Columns in New York, Andrew Renton, a writer and director of curating at Goldsmiths College at the time, and then Tate director Nicholas Serota, admired the rigor and consistency of Abts’s painting. Abts’s Turner Prize exhibition featured eleven abstract works evenly spaced around one room, and was designed to be viewed as an installation, rather than a series of individual paintings. As Barber reflected, "Her work has grown and grown on me with every viewing. . . . Tomma Abts came through purely on the strength of her work. Her Turner Prize room is truly thrilling."
The Turner Prize is given annually to "a British artist," which includes non-nationals working in the UK and British artists working abroad. In 2006, Abts, who was born in Germany, had been living and working in London for twelve years. Covering the news of Abts’s award in The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins reported that Abts was a popular winner among the British art world; Higgins noted how Abts "uses no source material, but allows the form of the paintings to emerge as she applies layers of colour—a process that mingles disciplined severity with pure intuition. The results are entirely distinctive—some of the forms look as if they want to struggle into three dimensions; others coil, snakelike, across the canvas."
Watch a video interview with Abts filmed on the occasion of her Turner Prize award.