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.
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