Clik here to view.
A critical look at the work of the four candidates: two very different types of painter, a video artist and a sculptor
All of the artists here could easily have been included seamlessly in any Turner shortlist of the past decade. Is this George Shaw's moment? Somewhere, on an English housing estate, it is always a George Shaw moment – a dull Sunday or a walk-the-bloody-dog empty afternoon. His paintings of 1960s estates and hinterlands are defiantly local and prosaic, but probably look exotic and poetic to viewers from abroad. And there is something Larkinesque – as well as Hancockesque – in his work. Perversely anachronistic, at his best he achieves a kind of universality. The tedium in Shaw's dutiful technique matches the places he depicts. To describe this as minor art also catches the mood exactly.
Karla Black's work is painting by other means. Her work is all about surfaces and materials – scrumpled polythene sheet, powdery makeup, glistening conditioners, drools of body lotion. It's as if she started making herself up for a Friday night but found herself painting instead. What she does manages to be at once tacky and beguiling, oddly pretty and pretty horrible; this is to do with the physical properties of her everyday materials and their associations – to the cosmetic and to all that faecal paint the abstract expressionists once flung about. Its all makeup and make-believe. Both a parody of painting and a homage to it. Black's work frequently makes me laugh, nervously.
Bodies also appear and disappear in Hilary Lloyd's videos, films and slide-show presentations. Lloyd is as much into the hardware of projectors, screens on shiny metal poles, the techno-dreck of wires and boxes, as the images of cranes and bridges, motorbikes and bodies they project.
All this technology will soon look dated. Lloyd's art frequently bores me, but I keep thinking I'm not clever enough, not hard-wired for it. I'm always aware of a dry little academic commentary starting up in my head. Then another thought intrudes: can I stop watching yet?
Martin Boyce's sculptures and installations often relate to utopian, modernist design. Lots of artists are currently mining this territory (even Shaw's work makes reference to it), and it is beginning to feel a bit of a cliche. But this is the world whose legacy we live with. Angular neon-tube trees – that look like they're doing calisthenics, drifts of fallen leaves, a hosepipe snaking through a metal grille, all have their place in his work.
If Black's work looks like painting but somehow isn't, Boyce's looks like sculpture, but is just as much a sort of mangled décor. That's what a lot of art is now, for better or for worse. Shaw or Black to win!
