Turner Prize 2016 awarded to Helen Marten
An installation by Helen Marten is pictured during a photocall for the 2016 Turner Prize, at Tate Britain in London It appeared that Helen Marten was destined to win the Turner Prize; and now at 31 and the youngest of the four shortlisted nominees, she has. You could say an art star is born. Marten's work, hard to describe Describing her work is a challenge, devilishly hard, say some critics. We are meant to be intrigued and a little (if not greatly) puzzled. Ask Helen Marten what she does and she'll respond with a wry laugh and a question -- "What don't I do?"
Artist Helen Marten
The biographical essay in the Tate booklet, accompanying the Turner Prize 2016 show at Tate Britain, puts it like this: "An encounter with her work is akin to coming across a treasure map for an anonymous urban landscape in the not too distant future' (or perhaps a recent but already forgotten past) containing an elaborate sequence of puzzles in a language at once familiar and alien."
Her London dealer, Sadie Coles says something similar. The work, according to Coles is "akin to reading a slightly surreal pulp novel involving convoluted and unsolvable sequences of mysteries set in an unidentifiable urban realm somewhere in the almost graspable future."
In short, Marten's art is hard to encapsulate.
LINK: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/05/arts/turner-prize-2016-winner/index.html
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