Turner Prize Exhibition

Today I went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner Prize Exhibition. The exhibition displays the work of the four final nominees for the prize. The winner has not yet been announced.

Below you can see the work of Simon Starling. And yes, it is a big shed and an electric bicycle.

This wasn’t actually my favourite of the four finalists but it was one of the only two that lent itself towards a decent picture for my site.

My favourite was …

… the Gillian Carnegie paintings, especially the Black Square textured paintings. They don’t show up at all well on screen but in real life the black squares depict a woodland scene made entirely from the texture of the paint.

If asked, I’d put the Jim Lambie work in second place, although judging by the video of his other works the exhibition on show today didn’t really do him justice.

I didn’t feel the video installation did all that much for me. It seemed very bog standard - darkened room, sombre music and obscure repetitive film clips. I’ve only seen about a billion similar installations. Other people I was with liked it, though.

And the shed? Well, the artist went to enormous lengths to create the shed to demonstrate the transition of materials into art. He cut the shed up and turned it into a boat. Then he put the remainder of the shed into the boat and paddled it 8km down The Reine where he then reassembled it into a shed. As you’d expect, that still doesn’t make the shed nice to look at.

After the exhibition there’s a room with a wall where visitors can leave comments. Many of which are hilarious in their unrestrained brutality. I feel sorry for the artists who get to read “Utter Rubbish. A spell in the army would sort you lot out.”

The rest of Tate Britain is well worth seeing, especially Chris Ofili’s The Upper Room with it’s coloured monkey pictures and elephant dung.

Eve by Sir Thomas Brock is especially stunning in pure white marble at the end of a purple room.

Thanks to Sanchita of The Social Service for arranging the trip.