Turner Prize won by 66-year-old sculptor Veronica Ryan

This year’s Turner Prize, the illustrious British visual arts prize, goes to Veronica Ryan (1956). This was announced in a live broadcast on BBC Four on Wednesday evening. The British sculptor is the oldest artist ever to receive the Turner Prize. In her installations she incorporates family histories, childhood and healing in images and installations. The jury praised her for the way she mixes the personal and the poetic.

Veronica Ryan investigates “how we relate to objects and how they relate to us,” she says in an accompanying film to the exhibition in Tate Liverpool, where works by the four nominees can still be seen until mid-March. Ryan loves “contradictions and paradoxes and how they say something about our culture more broadly.” She collects things and materials “like a magpie” and uses them for her art.

Monument Windrush Generation

Ryan created the first official monument in East London to celebrate the Windrush generation, the British who came to the UK from former colonies in the Caribbean in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – Ryan herself came as a baby with her parents to the United Kingdom.

The other nominees were Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard and Sin Wai Kin. This year’s selection of finalists consisted of three women and a non-binary artist. It was the first time that the jury nominated a non-binary artist. It had happened before that no men were nominated. At the ceremony, host Holly Johnson, lead singer of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, said that journalists who wondered why men were not shortlisted should consider that the work of male artists was “apparently not good enough.”

hassle

Remarkably enough, there was little criticism of the nominees themselves this year. That is often different, and last year criticism reached an all-time low. In 2021, only art collectives were nominated. According to the reviewers, they had the level of neighborhood art projects, or were only local activists. In the British media it was suggested that the price should be abolished.

However, the Turner Prize, which has been awarded annually since 1984, would not be the Turner Prize if there were no fuss this year as well. Now the problem was that the jury would not be independent: three of the four jury members this year were involved in the exhibitions of three of the nominees.

“It is institutionally lazy to say the least and suggests that artist careers in the UK are increasingly becoming inbred, self-selected and an insider affair,” wrote the British art magazine Art Review. That is insurmountable when you work with a jury of people from the profession, the jury parried the suspicion after the award ceremony.

Read also: All four of the Turner Prize nominees are up to date