Who are the Turner Prize nominees?

From iPhones to Martin Luther King Jr – what to expect from the four nominees

Lubaina Himid
(Image credit: Tate website / Stuart Whipps)

The annual race for the Turner Prize is underway and the four nominees are older than usual.

The Tate has removed the upper age limit of 50 this year, acknowledging that artists can experience a "breakthrough" at any age.

As a result, these four artists have decades of work behind them for you to feast your eyes upon. Here's a rundown of what to expect from each:

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Hurvin Anderson

Credit: Tate / courtesy of the artist

Anderson, 52, was born in Birmingham but is of Jamaican descent. His paintings draw from his own childhood, while also tackling black history, the Daily Telegraph writes, and include a barber shop interior plastered with images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and a tennis court seen from behind a chicken wire fence. He also paints more figuratively: at the Michael Werner gallery, liquid green abstracts ruffled by the odd flower or shadow abound.

Andrea Buttner

Credit: Tate website / Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Gunnar Meier

German artist Andrea Buttner, 45, works across a range of mediums including sculpture, film and glass. Her abstract paintings focus on structure, shapes and silhouettes; elsewhere there are photographs of squares of black and white lying on ordinary streets. Her work often has a technological dimension – blow-ups of the fingerprints left on iPhone screens, or a box of plants sitting beneath a TV screen also showing greenery.

Lubaina Himid

Credit: Tate website / Stuart Whipps

At 62, Himid, born in Zanzibar and living in Preston, is the oldest person ever to be nominated for the Turner. A professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire, Himid examines the reclaiming of selves and black identity. There are human cut-outs and paintings of black women in dresses expressing their support for black rights. Recently she has begun painting on newspapers, farm carts and planks of wood.

Himid used to think art "could change the world. I understand now that it's capable of opening up conversations but that much of what I tried to change has remained the same," she told Apollo Magazine last month.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Credit: Tate website / courtesy of the artist

Liverpool-based Nashashibi, 43, is of Palestinian-Irish heritage. She works mainly in 16mm film, but occasionally uses photography. Her work often features ordinary actions made extraordinary – people playing football in the West Bank, or women rifling through a Salvation Army jumble sale as an Egyptian love song plays on the soundtrack. "I'm interested in going between things being staged and things just being," she told an Institute of Contemporary Arts interview back in 2009.

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