Barbara Walker, a British artist who draws huge portraits of Black people onto gallery walls, and Jesse Darling, a sculptor whose works evoke fragile bodies, are among the artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, the prestigious British visual arts award.
The four-strong shortlist was announced on Thursday at a news conference at the Tate Britain art museum in London.
Walker, 58, is perhaps the highest-profile artist to be nominated, with works in the collections of Tate, the British Museum and the Yale Center for British Art.
She is nominated for “Burden of Proof,” which appeared last year at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, and included charcoal portraits of people affected by Britain’s “Windrush scandal,” in which some long-term British residents, originally from the Caribbean, were misidentified as illegal immigrants and threatened with deportation.
Walker drew these portraits directly onto the gallery walls, as well as onto copies of the paperwork that the British government demanded the residents produce.