| London Art Award 2012 |
The London Awards for Art and Performance is the country's most expansive awards and recognises artists and performers across many art-forms. Each is presented to an individual or team who have made an outstanding contribution to their art form.
Who better than the nominees themselves to judge each category. We'll be asking nominees in each of the categories to pick their top artist/s and from that we'll arrive at the shortlist and award winner who will receive the trophy. The shortlist and winner will be announced at the Presentation Ceremony in June.
There will also be a public vote, where anyone can vote online. However, this will only be taken into account if there's a tie in the nominee votes.
Long list in competition (click on title for more) - nominations: 17
London Art Award Nomination Zarina Bhimji: '[Whitechapel Gallery exhibition] Elegiac in mood and very beautiful, the photographs are immaculately composed, with an acute sensitivity to the play of light across rooms and surfaces.'
Greg Tallent · Facebook · Twitter · Email · 15 hrs
London Art Award Nomination Gordon Baldwin: '.. a British studio potter whose vessels, handmade in stoneware or earthenware, speak with sophistication and subtlety the language of modernism, but move you with an intimacy that comes from their domestic scale and humble material.'
Greg Tallent · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 20
London Art Award Nomination Eddie Peake: '.. deftly spins a yarn made of different historical strands of camp and homoerotics. The biggest mistake would be to take anything too seriously here, but then it’s as if Peake is toying with the risk of making an authentically inscrutable position out of the slippery surfaces of artifice and masquerade that usually signify sexual identity.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 18
London Art Award Nomination Samantha Donnelly: 'She serves up a freakish world of fragmented intimacies. If the surrealist Hans Bellmer had been let loose in Poundland he might have created something similar. Broken armatures are decked out with amoebic limbs; organic substances abutted against geometric plastic. Bits dangle, squirm and writhe about; it's guttural kitsch, erotic farce. As playful as it is perverse, Donnelly's art is daft yet deeply serious.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 01
London Art Award Nomination Leo Fitzmaurice: '.. a master of re-presentation; of deconstructing context and heading off on another narrative, or other such art-related nomenclature. I’m presuming that one day, while gazing at the floor of a café in Sao Paulo, or strolling, head-down, along a street in Shanghai, the artist spotted a besmirched cigarette packet damply splayed, and thought, ‘That looks exactly like the new Tranmere away strip’. And there, or thereabouts, began a new obsession.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Jan 27
London Art Award Nomination Paul Winstanley: '.. paints nondescript places and anonymous figures...Like all of his works, these emanate stillness and quietude, actually seeming to dampen sound and emphasizing the experience of looking. With considered—and considerable—nuance and deftness, Winstanley makes a case for the continuing relevance of painting and its capacity for translating seeing into feeling.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Jan 23
London Art Award Nomination Bedwyr Williams: ".. some people classify him as a stand-up comedian as much as an artist. There's the 26ft-tall skyscraper beehive, a bicycle covered in wool with sheep horns for handlebars and a piece inspired by two cross-dressing cage fighters in Swansea's city centre – all described in a laconic and often hilarious deadpan. ‘He's marvellously talented and – unusually for contemporary art – very funny,’ says Laura Cumming, the Observer's art critic."
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Jan 02
London Art Award Nomination Nathaniel Mellors: '.. maker of multi-part videos and animatronic heads that gurn, spew and mumble, mangling language to the fascination of curators and commentators who find in Mellors a piquant interplay of low humour and high philosophy.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Dec 21
London Art Award nomination Tony Cragg: 'I’m not a religious person—I’m an absolute materialist—and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime. When I’m involved in making sculpture, I’m looking for a system of belief or ethics in the material. I want that material to have a dynamic, to push and move and grow.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Dec 16
London Art Award nomination John Stezaker: '.. his insidiously disturbing images sidestep rational thought, and appeal directly to the irrational substrata of the imagination.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Dec 08
London Art Award nomination Paul Noble: '.. this is an epic vision of the ridiculousness and mysteries of human life. It resembles one of British art's true magnum opuses.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Dec 02
London Art Award nomination Ralph Steadman: '.. extinct birds "have more character than today’s politicians."'
David Knight · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 25
London Art Award nomination David Shrigley: '.. has authored several books, directed music videos for Blur and Bonnie Prince Billy, released spoken word albums, and boasted solo and group exhibitions across the world since 1991.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 24
London Art award nomination George Shaw: '.. suburbia can often feel like “the one place on earth that’s further from anywhere else.”'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 16
London Art Award nomination Anna King: 'I find myself in a no-mans land. Unclaimed territory, that, for a while anyway, I can have as my own.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 11
London Art Award Nomination Tacita Dean: '[on film] Totally new and oddly out of time, with its cutaway images, hand-painted mountains, rivers of lightning like pulsing nerves.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Oct 21
