London,

Eyes on the Prize

Fisun Guner 05.10.06

A painter, a video artist, an installationist and a sculptor.

At least you can't accuse this year's Turner Prize judges of showing category bias. Mark Titchner's massive billboard and hypnotic video works are thoughtful and wacky, in a vein similar to Keith Tyson, who won the Turner Prize in 2002.

By taking mission statements and faith slogans and incorporating them into his 'mind-bending' installations, he renders them sinister.

But, for all their cleverness, it's difficult to engage with Titchner in this instance. Whether this is because the sculptures here are quite ugly, or because there's little generally in the way of emotional resonance, is hard to say.

Rebecca Warren's works once had a sexy vitality: her amorphous clay sculptures (pictured) are, at first, abstract blobs that quickly turn into heaving breasts and melting limbs.

Referencing sculptors such as Rodin and Degas, she seeks to puncture sculptural traditions - though the same joke can get wearing.

Here she also seeks to move in a new direction: a series of wall vitrines containing ephemera are reminiscent of Joseph Beuys. But an artist who continually reminds you of other artists is in danger of making herself the parody.

Tomma Abts and Phil Collins are the two surprises here. Abts is an abstract painter and though her paintings might be dismissed as merely interestingly decorative, the longer you look the more interesting and seductive they become.

And Collins's 'reality' video, in which a woman talks about her troubled life for an hour - and how reality TV has made even more of a mess of it - is fascinating. Move over Trisha.

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