Wrapped Sculpture, Nnena Kalu

The prestigious Turner Prize was recently awarded to Scottish artist, Nnena Kalu. Her canvases are gorgeous swirls of colour; her breathtaking sculptures are bound and layered wrapped materials that explore materiality, layering, scale, space and repetition. In addition to being a remarkable artist, Kalu is not neurotypical. Sadly, the artist’s neurodivergent status has overshadowed the artist’s brilliant work for which she won the coveted award.

If you’ve been following my posts, you will know that my mantra is “lead with the art.” In other words, promote the art, not the artist’s personal characteristics and traits which can, in my opinion, fetishize and marginalize the artist’s work. However, in the world of outsider art, and particularly the European concept of art brut, the artist’s personal characteristics often take centre-stage in presenting their work. The art world’s response to the Turner award were mixed. Naysayers have loud voices. The controversy was beautifully summed up by Eddy Frankel for artnet:

I can’t remember the Turner Prize ever pulling people in so many different directions, engendering so much effusive praise, celebratory vindication, and sneery dismissiveness at the same time. As for the negative reactions, they should be treated with the same scorn they’ve treated Kalu with. Jonathan Jones dismissing the work as “academic” in the Guardian badly missed the mark. Waldemar Januszczak saying dumb stuff in the Times about how the sculptures look “as if zero thought had gone into making them” (rarely has a sentence so desperately made me want to claw my own eyes out), or how the jury had confused “therapy with talent” (Jesus Christ, forget my eyes, I want to claw my own brain out now) is the kind of thick-headed, antiquated, troglodytic, self-preservational, geriatric clickbait that will lead to the death of art criticism.

Well said.

The point of all this is that art is art. Nnena Kalu won the Turner Prize because she made the best art. She is an accomplished artist who is entitled to stand proudly beside her peers in the art world, regardless of how her brain functions.