UK’s Turner Prize Awarded to Artist Jesse Darling
Artist Jesse Darling has been named the latest recipient of the Turner Prize, the UK’s top award for artists, receiving a grant of £25,000 ($31,500) annually. The announcement was made at an evening ceremony in Eastbourne, southeast England.
Darling, a 41-year-old Oxford-born, Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist, works across sculpture, video, drawing, and performance. Their Turner Prize-winning exhibition is an installation that immerses viewers in a custom-built environment evoking chaotic city streets and industrial barriers.
The installation features barbed wire framing the entryway to a gallery space, anthropomorphized crowd-control fences stampeding across the floor and climbing the walls, and unsettling props like crutches, dusty piles of ring binders, and chunks of concrete. The installation conveys a familiar yet delirious world, invoking societal breakdown and unsettling perceived notions of labor, class, Britishness, and power.
The Turner Prize, named after the 19th-century painter JMW Turner, is awarded each year to an exemplary artist born or based in the UK. Nominated artists exhibit their work in the past year, and Darling was nominated for their solo exhibitions “No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford and “Enclosures” at the Camden Art Centre.
The Turner Prize-winning exhibition, along with the installations of fellow nominees, will remain on display at the Towner Eastbourne art gallery through April 14, 2024.
Darling’s winning exhibition has been described as conveying a familiar yet delirious world. Previous recipients of the Turner Prize include Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, and Anish Kapoor. Next year, the prize will celebrate its 40th anniversary.