Tomma Abts Turner Prize

Tomma Abts

"With a rigorous approach and self-imposed limitations to both scale and composition, Tomma Abts (b. 1967) has reinvigorated painterly abstraction and its relevance within contemporary art. Using a fixed canvas size and a vertical format, Abts deploys basic formal elements such as arcs, circles, planes, and stripes to create powerful works that are at once subtle and eccentric. This extraordinary book, designed in collaboration with the artist herself, is a substantial and deeply insightful treatment of her career to date and features sixty works made over the past decade. Essays not only contextualize Abts's work within an art-historical framework of methods, process, and style, but also examine her paintings' philosophical and psychological dimensions and their embodiment of a creative process that transcends the specifics of any particular work. The beautifully designed and illustrated exhibition catalogue examines both the art-historical framework of Tomma Abts's painting as well as its deep philosophical and psychological dimensions. James Rondeau is president and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lizzie Carey-Thomas is head of programs at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Kate Nesin is an independent art historian. Juliane Rebentisch is a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at the Offenbach University of Art and Design in Berlin"--

Turner Prize 2006

The Uses of Reason in the Evaluation of Artworks

This book uses an examination of the annual Turner Prize to defend the view that the evaluation of artworks is a reason-based activity, notwithstanding the lack of any agreed criteria for judging excellence in art. It undertakes an empirical investigation of actual critical practice as evident within published commentaries on the Prize in order to examine and test theories of critical evaluation, including the ideas of Noel Carroll, Frank Sibley, Kendall Walton and Suzanne Langer. Case studies of work by Turner Prize winners such as Steve McQueen, Martin Creed, Tomma Abts are used to explore definitions of art and concepts of artistic value and meaning. The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of aesthetics, contemporary art and cultural studies, but also to practitioners working in the arts, media and education.