The Shortlist
Hurvin Anderson
While Hurvin Anderson has been consistently producing work for the past 30 years, a major retrospective at Tate Britain won the Birmingham-born artist new admirers. His paintings, which play with abstraction and realism in imaginative and compelling ways, explore identity, politics and the constructed environment – but if these themes seem modish, they have long been important to a 61-year-old artist who has been honing his craft since he first came to painting.
Michael Armitage
The spaces of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice are unforgiving to artists who lack a clear vision for their exhibition. Michael Armitage is not one of these artists. The clarity of his style, his memorable use of colour and the boldness of his frequently political paintings are more than equal to the cavernous rooms of the Grassi. The exhibition outshone nearly every other artist who was exhibiting nearby as part of the Venice Biennale.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s exhibition at Tate Modern was designed to affirm her claim to a lasting legacy. Far from being a nostalgic indulgence, the show was a full expression of what she has achieved. Hers is an oeuvre that has got under the skin of the public in a way that few other artists have managed – as demonstrated by the queues around the block to see her work at the Tate.
Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa’s film Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) proved a breakout hit when it was streamed on the websites of US museums at the start of the current President’s first term. ‘I Am Tony’, which opened at the New Museum in New York in September, positioned Jafa almost as a historian holding the record of the United States to account, his rigorous research transformed by an artistry that can, as he puts it, ‘simultaneously alienate and ravish’.
Kerry James Marshall
If the Royal Academy needed a show to help it appear more enticing to the public, it chose well with ‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’, which has now gone on to wow the art lovers of Paris. What can be read as paintings about identity reveal, on closer inspection, an artist who handles paint with such bravura that there’s little doubt he is up there with the greats.
Rose Wylie
At the age of 91, Rose Wylie could have easily decided to retire. Instead she filled the Royal Academy with a lifetime’s work that showed her to be one of the boldest artists in the business. Videos of Wylie might have charmed social media, but the real work was hanging on the walls in an idiosyncratic mix of child-like painting and words writ large – works that, for all their apparent naivety, don’t shy away from life’s horrors.
The winner will be announced on 19 November.
The Shortlists | Artist of the Year | Museum Opening of the Year | Exhibition of the Year | Book of the Year | Acquisition of the Year
