This year’s Turner shock: shortlist met with approval

For 24 years the Tate Gallery's annual Turner Prize has shocked and outraged the mainstream media. From Tracey Emin's unmade bed to Chris Offili's elephant dung paintings and Martin Creed's single light bulb entitled The lights going on and off to last year's winner Mark Leckey's video about cartoon characters, the choice of artists for one of contemporary art's most prestigious prizes has consistently been slated for being eclectic and bizarre.

This year then, the biggest shock about the shortlist for the 25th Turner Prize is that the British press approves of the judges' selection.

One reason is that three of the four finalists for the £25,000 prize - Enrico David, Richard Wright and Lucy Skaer – are painters or drawers.

Painting has made a "surprising comeback... after years of being neglected" said the Daily Telegraph's arts correspondent Stephen Adams. "Three out of four artists on this year's shortlist either draw or paint, a far cry from recent years which have been dominated by video installations and hard to understand 'sculptures'."

The fourth finalist, Roger Hiorns, is not a painter, notes Adams, but his work is "far from obscure". The 34-year-old's entry includes his hugely popular 2008 work Seizure (above) - in which he turned a disused south London council flat into a shimmering cave made of blue copper sulphate crystals. Most coverage featured on Hiorns' cave, with the Sun calling it "stunning".

"Publicity-grabbing stunts are refreshingly absent," noted the Times's Ben Hoyle. Although he noted Enrico David's solo exhibition at the Museum für Gegen-wartskunst in Basle does include "an obscene photo collage" based on the BBC's children's TV programme In The Night Garden. The Turner Prize jury has said, however, that this is not typical of his work.

Jury chairman Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, denied that the judges' six-hour selection process "certainly did not begin with a postmortem on last year". Another juror, Jonathan Jones, an art critic for the Guardian, said this year's shortlist was one "which dazzles.”

The Turner Prize exhibition opens on October 7 and the winner will be announced on December 7.

PHOTO: Roger Hiorns' 'Seizure 2008', a Jerwood/Artangel Commission, Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London  ·