turner prize 09 fo' shizzle!

Enrico David
My heart sank when I first saw Enrico David's work. There's a super-snotty, measured, illustratively cool quality to his gouaches for sure, but his sculpture is terrible. Looking at the [hi! I'm surreal and also postmodern!] 3d work feels like being told a Steven Hawking joke like it's something new. It's really really boring and really really old and not funny.

Richard Wright
Richard Wright's work is much more refreshing. He paints intricate optic patterns on the walls of the gallery in gold leaf. I think I like the implied narrative here best - the idea that the artist was present in each room for a significant amount of time. It's also enjoyable to see something so hopelessly fleeting and unsaleable. Plus his titles are playfully formal - Untitled, No Title, Not Titled. I'm easily pleased.

Roger Hiorns
Roger Hiorns is probably the most discussable artist, as his 2008 installation, Siezure involved the incredible (yet not forgetting, very Rachel Whiteread) tactic of filling an abandoned south London flat in copper sulphate in order to encrust the entire location with breathtaking crystals. The title is gorgeous, and the piece is clearly moving in its complex physicality, its frozen, natural process. He's a young dude, and is very modern. Like, painfully, crisply, cold morning-ly modern. He'll probably win it.

Lucy Skaer
The only chick on the list is a refreshingly back-to-basics sculptor and sketcher. Her work reminds me massively of Richard Long. A lot of people have talked about the metafictional qualities of her work, which is clearly apparent (Black Alphabet is 26 duplicate sculptures of Brancusi's Bird in Space made from compressed coal dust) but I find the deliberate, bitter monochrome of her work to be quite naturalistic. It's the right side of postmodern and actually the right side of retro for once, as it pays its homage with sincerity.