Helen Marten, Brood and Bitter Pass (2016), via Art Observed

Helen Marten, the Macclesfield-born, London-based sculptor known for her disjointed, endlessly inventive configurations of materials, has taken home the 2016 Turner Prize, the second major award that the artist has won in the past month.  Marten, who takes home a£25,000 purse for the award, was selected from a pool of artists including Anthea Hamilton, Michael Dean, and Josephine Pryde.

Helen Marten, via W Magazine

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Anthea Hamilton, Project for a Door (After Gaetano Pesce) (2016), vi Art Observed

With the early weeks of the fall art season comes the opening of the annual Turner Prize exhibition, bringing together works from each of the artists’ nominated for Britain’s highest honor for contemporary art.  This year’s exhibition, one of the more cohesively selected, and consistently inventive in recent years, has already earned impressive accolades, with a striking quartet of artist’s each exploring constructions of space and identity through diverse historical, technical, and material connections. (more…)

The Turner Prize shortlist has been announced for 2016, The Guardian reports, counting Anthea Hamilton, Michael Dean, Helen Marten and Josephine Pryde among those who will show at the annual Turner Prize exhibition in competition for the £25,000 prize. (more…)

Mircea Cantor’s work in FIAC 2011, image by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed, all photos by Art Observed unless otherwise noted.

By the close of FIAC on Sunday evening, some 68,000+ visitors had come through the fair.  These attendance figures represent a 6% increase from the previous year, reports the New York Times.  Housed this year in the exuberant Grand Palais, the fair showed strong sales from the get go. Despite the global economic downtown of recent years, the atmosphere was effervescent. French, American, and German galleries dominated the space (55, 26, and 21, respectively), but participants from Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa showed a strong presence at the fair for the first time. New York newcomers Matthew Marks, Eleven Rivington, Andrew Kreps, Michele Maccarone and Friedrich Petzel did well, and Pace Gallery made a comeback after a long absence. Compared to Frieze the week before in London, many fair-goers felt that the Parisian fair was riskier in content, creating a more exciting and eclectic display of artworks.

More text and images after the jump… (more…)