Claudette Johnson, the established Black British artist who has created some of the most powerful figurative art of recent decades, has been nominated for the Turner Prize which marks its 40th anniversary this year. The other artists on the shortlist are Manila-born Pio Abad, Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur and Worthing-born Delaine Le Bas. The Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain opens this autumn (25 September-16 February 2025).
Johnson was nominated for two shows: Presence at The Courtauld Gallery in London and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects in New York. At a press briefing held today, one of the prize judges, the director general and chief executive of Japan House London, Sam Thorne, said that Johnson “invests her sitters with conviviality and vulnerability” as well as intimacy and empathy.
Compared to a period in which she barely showed her work between the 1990s and 2010s, in recent years Johnson has shown widely to much acclaim. The Courtauld Gallery show, her first major museum presentation in London, featured works ranging from her 1980s “semi-abstract” pieces to a new painting.
In an interview with The Art Newspaper last year, she said: “I am trying to subvert that male gaze. I am trying to introduce another gaze; a Black feminist gaze, if you like.
Pio Abad is nominated for his solo exhibition last year, To Those Sitting in Darkness, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The show told stories of “plunder and exchange” said Thorne, highlighting “entangled histories” around colonialism. “We were struck with how it chimed with inscription and incision,” Thorne added. In 2022, Abad featured on The Art Newspaper’s Week in Art podcast, discussing the infamous collection of the Marcos family in the Philippines.
Jasleen Kaur is nominated for her solo exhibition Alter Altar at Tramway in Glasgow, which drew on the artist’s childhood in Glasgow’s Sikh community. A Tate statement says that “the jury praised the artist’s evocative combination of sound and sculpture to address specifics of family memory and community struggle”. In 2021 Kaur unveiled a Waterfronts commission on England’s southeast coast.
Delaine Le Bas is nominated for her presentation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession in Vienna, which reflected the cultural history of the Roma people, replete with painted fabrics and theatrical sculptures. The exhibition illustrated Le Bas’s “beautifully articulated visual language”, said the prize judge Rosie Cooper, director of Wysing Arts Centre, at the briefing, adding that the show in Vienna “signalled a turning point in her practice”.
The Turner Prize, once considered provocative, will be awarded 3 December; the winner receives £40,000 with £10,000 awarded to the other shortlisted artists. The first edition of the prize in 1984 was won by Malcolm Morley; other previous winners include Chris Ofili (1997) and Elizabeth Price (2012). The prize exhibitions returns to Tate Britain for the first time in six years.
