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Martin Boyce wins the 2011 Turner Prize

Scotsman Martin Boyce takes home the £25,000 prize.

This year's Turner Prize has been awarded to Martin Boyce for his installation "Do Words Have Voices".

Boyce, who is the third Turner Prize winner in a row to come from Glasgow, is known for transforming gallery spaces into urban landscapes. His high modernist work "Do Words Have Voices" recreates a park scene and includes a slanted rubbish bin and hanging aluminium leaves.

Photographer Mario Testino awarded Boyce the £25,000 cheque at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, where the exhibition has been held this year.

Boyce thanked his family and paid tribute to the Glasgow School of Art where he studied. He said: "When education is going through the wringer, it is important to acknowledge the value of teachers."

Ben Luke, writing in the Evening Standard, says that Boyce's "installations riff on modernist design, which sounds dry, but [he] manages to produce distinctly poetic environments from a range of carefully crafted materials."

In the Telegraph, Mark Hudson says: "In what amounts to a conscious slap in the face to popular taste, [the judges have] gone for the driest and most academic of the four: Martin Boyce, whose work reinterprets early 20th century Modernism in a distinctively cool conceptual way. Not that Boyce is by any stretch of the imagination a bad artist... While his work is far from without interest, his win is yet another sign of the increasing academicisation of contemporary art."

The Turner Prize judges said that Boyce opened up "a new sense of poetry" through his installation.

This year's Turner Prize shortlist had been judged the strongest in recent years. The other shortlisted artists were Karla Black, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw.

6 comments

Jorge Peterman's picture

Pseudo-intelectual, superfluous claptrap.

Captain Chaos's picture

Great piece of art

truly blurs the boundary from the art, artist, curator, and space.

Drakula's picture

How many of you out there would like to see the return of painting?

Even abstract painting?

Jeff Bunga's picture

Reginald Fah-Fah's art shoulc have won the Turner Prize.

I own one and they are fantastic

Drakula's picture

Well it's not exactly overcrowded is it; does this art please the majority of people or a few stuffy professors who have these artists on a purse string.
The art world is corrupt, it has no soul and needs to be challenged!!!!

swatantra nandanwar's picture

Turner is always good for a laugh, and an inspiration to Blue Peter fans, because they see any old junk put to good use.

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