Jesse Darling Wins Turner Prize 2023

The Turner Prize 2023 has been awarded to Jesse Darling. The winner of the £25,000 prize was announced at a ceremony presented by musician, creative and broadcaster Tinie Tempah at Eastbourne’s Winter Garden, adjacent to Towner Eastbourne, the hosts of this year’s prize.

The jury commended all four nominated artists for their distinct and affecting presentations. Together their varied practices, so well represented in their Turner Prize presentations, are grounded in the realities of the world today, often giving voice to themes of uncertainty and vulnerability. Their work brings immediacy to the issues they respond to, realising these themes in powerful and unexpected ways.

They awarded the prize to Jesse Darling. His recent practice encompasses sculpture, installation, text and drawing. The jury commended his use of materials and commonplace objects like concrete, welded barriers, hazard tape, office files and net curtains, to convey a familiar yet delirious world. Invoking societal breakdown, his presentation unsettles perceived notions of labour, class, Britishness and power.

One of the best-known visual arts prizes in the world, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. The prize is awarded to an artist born or based in the UK, for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work in the past twelve months. The shortlisted artists for 2023 were: Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker.

The members of the Turner Prize 2023 jury are Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre; Cédric Fauq, Chief Curator, Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Melanie Keen, Director of Wellcome Collection and Helen Nisbet, CEO and Artistic Director, Cromwell Place. The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain.

An exhibition of the four shortlisted artists is at Towner Eastbourne until 14 April 2024. It is curated by Noelle Collins, Exhibitions and Offsite Curator at Towner Eastbourne. This year’s prize is presented as part of Towner 100, a year-long celebration of arts and culture across Eastbourne and Sussex marking the centenary of Towner Eastbourne.

Turner Prize 2023 is sponsored by King & McGaw. The education partner is University of Sussex. Turner Prize is supported by Lorna Gradden, Chalk Cliff Trust, The John Browne Charitable Trust and The Uggla Family Foundation. It is also supported in 2023 by Eastbourne Borough Council and East Sussex County Council.

The prize will mark its 40th anniversary next year, returning to Tate Britain for the first time since 2018.

Images

High-resolution images and press pack available via Tate’s Dropbox.

Notes to Editors

Turner Prize 2023
28 September 2023 – 14 April 2024
Towner Eastbourne, Devonshire Park, College Road, Eastbourne BN21 4JJ
Open Tuesday to Sunday 10.00–17.00
Admission free

ABOUT TURNER PRIZE

Established in 1984, the Turner Prize is named after the radical British painter JMW Turner (1775-1851). Originating at Tate Britain, every other year the Turner Prize travels to a non-Tate venue in the UK, widening access to contemporary art by bringing it to a local leading arts venue. £25,000 is awarded to the winner, with £10,000 awarded to the other shortlisted artists. In 2024 the prize will return to Tate Britain for its 40th anniversary.

Previous Turner Prize winners are: 1984 Malcolm Morley; 1985 Howard Hodgkin; 1986 Gilbert & George; 1987 Richard Deacon; 1988 Tony Cragg; 1989 Richard Long; 1991 Anish Kapoor; 1992 Grenville Davey; 1993 Rachel Whiteread; 1994 Antony Gormley; 1995 Damien Hirst; 1996 Douglas Gordon; 1997 Gillian Wearing; 1998 Chris Ofili; 1999 Steve McQueen; 2000 Wolfgang Tillmans; 2001 Martin Creed; 2002 Keith Tyson; 2003 Grayson Perry; 2004 Jeremy Deller; 2005 Simon Starling; 2006 Tomma Abts; 2007 Mark Wallinger; 2008 Mark Leckey; 2009 Richard Wright; 2010 Susan Philipsz; 2011 Martin Boyce; 2012 Elizabeth Price; 2013 Laure Prouvost; 2014 Duncan Campbell; 2015 Assemble; 2016 Helen Marten; 2017 Lubaina Himid; 2018 Charlotte Prodger; 2019 Hamdan/Cammock/Murillo/Shani; 2021 Array Collective; 2022 Veronica Ryan.

ABOUT WINNER

Jesse Darling

Jesse Darling was born in Oxford in 1981. Darling studied at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and completed an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2014. In 2021, he released his first collection of poetry, Virgins, Monitor Books (Salford, UK). Jesse Darling is 41 and lives and works in Berlin.

Darling works in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, sound, text and performance, using a ‘materialist poetics’ to explore and reimagine the everyday technologies that represent how we live. Darling has often combined industrial materials such as sheet metal and welded steel with everyday objects to explore ideas of the domestic and the institutional, home and state, stability and instability, function and dysfunction, growth and collapse. The acknowledgment of a shared vulnerability inherent in both the individual and the collective body are important considerations in Darling’s practice.

Darling was nominated for his solo exhibitions No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre. No Medals, No Ribbons was the largest presentation of the artist’s work to date, in which a freewheeling series of consumer goods, liturgical devices, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols – detached from their own taxonomies and standing in for bodies – proposed alternative ways of thinking and being. A rickety full-sized roller coaster, bent into the skeletal form of a woolly mammoth, evoked parallel histories of extraction, leisure and the museum; an army of plastic bags for cheap chain stores marched in place on steel legs like soldiers; mobility aids, bent into strange shapes, slump and crawl across the floor. These works and others, spanning ten years of his practice, highlighted how systems of power such as government, religion, ideology, technology and empire, can be as fragile and contingent as living things.

Darling was the fourth recipient of the Camden Art Centre Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship and the resulting exhibition Enclosures was the culmination of research developed over two years. The exhibition title references the historic Inclosures Act, by which the common lands of Britain were made private property and territory, and to consider clay as a material formed from architectural, ancestral, cultural, and corporeal bodies of our material world.

Other solo exhibitions include: Miserere, St James’s Piccadilly, London (2022); Gravity Road, Kunsteverein Freiburg, Germany (2020); Crevé, Triangle France – Astérides, Marseille, France (2019) and The Ballad of Saint Jerome, Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2018).

Group exhibitions include: Exposed, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2023); Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK (2023); Barbe à Papa, CAPC Bordeaux, France (2022); Drawing in the Continuous Present, The Drawing Center, New York, US (2022); WALK!, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2022); Crip Time, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); A Fine Line, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2020); Transcorporealities, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2019) and May You Live in Interesting Times, 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2019).

ABOUT TOWNER EASTBOURNE

Collecting and exhibiting contemporary art for 100 years, Towner Eastbourne sits where the coast and the South Downs meet. Towner presents exhibitions of national and international importance for audiences in Eastbourne, the UK and beyond, showcasing the most exciting and creative developments in modern and contemporary art. Towner develops and supports artistic practice and collaborates with individuals, communities and organisations to deliver an inclusive, connected and accessible public programme of live events, film and learning. Towner’s collection of almost 5,000 works is best known for its modern British art – including the largest and most significant body of work by Eric Ravilious (1903-42) – and a growing collection of international contemporary art including Elizabeth Price, Rachel Jones, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Wolfgang Tillmans and Andy Warhol. Eastbourne ALIVE is celebrating the Turner Prize 2023 with a special programme of public art, dance, music and community events brought to you in collaboration with creative partners led by Towner Eastbourne. To find out more, visit townereastbourne.org.uk or follow @townergallery.

ABOUT TINIE TEMPAH

Tinie Tempah is a musician with 3 top ten albums and 7 number one singles. He has recently collaborated with Kris Kross Amsterdam and Sofia Reyes on ‘How You Samba’, which has seen huge success across Europe and is nearing 60 million streams. He also nurtures new talent with his own roster and label. Away from music he has ventured into TV, with the second season of Extraordinary Extensions being broadcasted on Channel 4 next year and his new show Bangers airing on Channel 4 in October 2023. Tinie acted In Amazon prime’s Jungle, launched a food venture called RAPS and started up a new rave concept called ‘Shelter’. Tinie Tempah grew up in Woolwich, in one of South London’s largest Nigerian communities. In his own words: “Making it this far wasn’t something I expected, so I’m determined to hold onto everyone around me who helped keep me grounded, and bring up the new generation while I’m at it.”