Lubaina Himid has been announced as the winner of the 2017 Turner Prize. The artist is the oldest artist to win Tate’s annual award, and the first black woman to receive the accolade in the prize’s 23-year history
The £25,000 prize was presented by DJ, producer and artist Goldie at a ceremony in Hull Minster on Tuesday evening. This year the Turner Prize is being held at Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery as a highlight of its City of Culture year.
The 63-year old Himid won for a trio of shows in Oxford, Bristol and Nottingham. The artist’s presentation at Ferens surveyed paintings, drawings and sculpture which address the history and contemporary realities of race and racism in Britain. The centrepiece of Himid’s presentation at the Ferens Art Gallery is her A Fashionable Marriage, from 1987, a bawdy stage-set-like reinterpretation of William Hogarth’s suite of paintings Marriage A la Mode (1743–45), transposing Hogarth’s acid satire of class, sex and wealth to the political conflicts of the 1980s.
It is the first year the prize could be awarded to an artist over fifty, after Tate announced in March that it was scrapping the age limit for shortlisted artists. At the time, Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson said that ‘now that its reputation is so firmly established, we want to acknowledge the fact that artists can experience a breakthrough in their work at any age.’ Himid herself acknowledged the vagaries of critical acclaim in her acceptance speech, saying: ‘To the art and cultural historians who cared enough to write essays about my work for decades, thank you, you gave me sustenance during the wilderness years.’
The other shortlisted artists were Hurvin Anderson, Andrea Büttner and Rosalind Nashashibi, who each receive £5,000. This year’s shortlist was drawn up by Martin Herbert, art critic associate editor at ArtReview, Dan Fox, co-editor at Frieze; Mason Leaver-Yap, Walker Art Center’s Bentson Scholar of Moving Image in Minneapolis and director of LUX; and Emily Pethick, director, The Showroom, London.
2 May 2017
