Exhibition of the week The Turner Prize 2017
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (01482-613902, www.hull2017.co.uk). Until 7 January 2018
“If you have lost faith with the Turner Prize, then this is your moment to take a fresh look,” said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. For years, the rules of British art’s “most prestigious award” eliminated artists aged over 50 from consideration. But this year the restriction has been lifted, and the resulting exhibition at Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery is all the better for it. The four shortlisted artists – painter Hurvin Anderson, filmmaker Rosalind Nashashibi, printmaker Andrea Büttner and Lubaina Himid, who makes paintings, prints, drawings and installations – all create very different work, but they all share an attitude that is “politically apposite and socially relevant”. The show ranges from Anderson’s “lush and strangely beautiful” explorations of black British identity to Nashashibi’s record of domestic life in Gaza. There are weak points, but, by expanding its remit, the Turner Prize has “broadened” and “deepened” its outlook.
Getting rid of the age limit is certainly a “good thing”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. Nevertheless, this is an “uneven and at times frustrating exhibition”. This is most apparent in the work of Himid, who at 63 is the oldest artist here. The best exhibit in her show, a Hogarth-inspired installation of cut-outs featuring the faces of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, was made back in 1986. Her more recent works are substantially less appealing; indeed, I’m not convinced she would have been nominated were it not for her earlier art. Much better are Nashashibi’s two films, which are slow-paced but “often extremely beautiful to look at”. Büttner’s work, meanwhile, has a striking “erudition and gravity”: one display introduces the life and times of the thinker and activist Simone Weil by punctuating excerpts from her writing with a wide variety of photographs and paintings.
Best of the lot is Anderson, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, he is a “proper painter” whose work combines deep art historical knowledge with commentary on life in multicultural Britain. His painting Is it OK to be black? (2016) depicts a barbershop window, with photos of the hairstyles on offer replaced by images of black political leaders. This is “serious, resonant stuff” that is “unapologetically absorbed in timeless painterly values”. On the whole, this Turner Prize is refreshingly light on “intellectual navel-gazing”. For the first time in years, the award deals with “themes and ideas that the non-art specialist might actually care about”.