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The shortlist featuring 'chicken man gong' sculptor and scratches on a Georgian table
Rashid Razaq28.04.09
Roger Hiorns, 34, a Goldsmiths College graduate, lives and works in London. His sculptures bring together discarded objects and unusual materials. Fire, foam, detergent and crystallisation have featured in his creations in which he explores chance and environmental fluctuations.
In 2003, Hiorns sunk a metal gully into the surface of the Sculpture Court at Tate Britain, but instead of water running down the grating, a flame rose up from it.
Blue crystals feature prominently in his work. He once submerged BMW car engines in copper sulphate solution to obscure their surfaces. Seizure is one of his most ambitious projects. Hiorns spent a year sealing off the bedsit and filling it with 90,000 litres of liquid copper sulphate, which encrusted every surface with crystals.
Italian-born Enrico David, 43, has been based in London since the late Eighties. He studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College and his work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, The Saatchi Gallery and the Venice Biennale. He produces sculpture, painting and installation but drawing is the starting point. His images and objects have been described as "a parade of rude and unruly characters" featuring cloth dolls, club-wielding harlequins, papier-mâché eggmen and bare-buttocked builders.
Chicken Man Gong, commissioned for Tate Britain's sculpture court in 2005, is among his most well-known pieces. As its name suggests, the sculpture was part chicken, part man and part gong.
Cambridge-born, Lucy Skaer, 34, is based in London and Glasgow. She attended the Glasgow School of Art and has been involved in group exhibitions including Beck's Futures at the ICA and Hayward Gallery's The British Art Show. She uses drawings, sculptures, films and photo-reportage images from the internet. Skaer then reinterprets the images outside of their original context. Her series Venn Diagrams (2001) created simple, overlapping pairings of images - such as dead bodies and snakes. Skaer's 16mm film collaboration with Rosalind Nashashibi, Flash in the Metropolitan 2006, presents a sequence of fragmented shots of museum artefacts lit up in the glare of a pulsing light at night. Fabrication (2009) is a series of monoprints made using the top of a marked and scratched Georgian table.
Richard Wright, 49, was born in London and graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art. He is based in Scotland. After 12 years of figurative painting, he made a dramatic transition to repetitive patterns and abstract marks. He said: "I wanted to get at the idea without the object getting in the way."
In 2004 Wright put prints of his designs over torn posters on walls in Mexico City. The prints faded and eventually disappeared. A recent work showed him painting alongside Samuel Beckett's black and white film Quad II.
