Turner Prize goes to an art rebel ... of 63!
IT was once the preserve of the young rebels of the art world.
But now that the Turner Prize has allowed the over-50s to enter, a 63-year- old has scooped it with a piece she made in 1986.
Organisers decided people were ‘never too old to experience a breakthrough’ and changed the rules for the first time since the £25,000 prize began in 1984.
Lubaina Himid – the oldest winner ever and the first black woman to take the prize – won for her piece A Fashionable Marriage, which takes aim at Margaret Thatcher.
Crudely-drawn figures represent the ‘greed and hedonism’ of 1980s London. The Zanzibar-born artist who lives in Preston said the piece – based on the work of satirist William Hogarth – takes aim at ‘European hypocrisy’ and the ‘sordid falseness’ of white people including Mrs Thatcher. Miss Himid added: ‘London in the 1980s in the midst of the hedonistic, greedy, self-serving, go-getting opportunistic mayhem, was a fabulous location for me as a satirist and wit.
‘Everyone who shook or moved in artistic semi- circles or political whirlpools was a deserving dartboard. I took aim and threw.’
The prize is often given to controversial pieces, including Damien Hirst’s 1995 work Mother and Child – two dead cows cut in half and put in tanks of formaldehyde.
The jury said they awarded the prize to Miss Himid for a trio of ‘outstanding’ shows in Oxford, Bristol and Nottingham.
Sculptor Anish Kapoor welcomed the change, saying the art world had an ‘obsession’ with youth.