Turner Art Prize Causes Controversy By Selecting Painter

For the first time in its 22 year history, the Turner Prize has selected a painter as its annual prize winner. When Tomma Abts starts her paintings he does not know how they might end. The Tate site says:

Tomma Abts’s paintings are the result of a rigorous working method that pitches the rational against the intuitive. She works consistently to a format of 48 x 38 centimetres in acrylic and oil paint. She uses no source material and begins with no preconceived idea of the final result. Instead, her paintings take shape through a gradual process of layering and accrual. As the internal logic of each composition unfolds forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes ‘congruent with itself’. Abts describes the finished works as ‘a concentrate of the many paintings underneath’, each functioning as an autonomous object revealing the visible traces of its construction.

Tate