Elizabeth Price wins the Turner Prize

Elizabeth Price, arguably the least well known of the four short-listed artists, has been announced as the winner of the 2012 Turner Prize.  Price was born in in 1966 in Bradford, UK, and received a Bachelors degree in fine art from Oxford University before attending the Royal College of Art where she obtained an MA in 1991. She also has a PhD from the University of Leeds.

The $40,000 prize was given to her by actor Jude Law.  Price won for her video The Woolworths Choir of 1979, which combines music, photographs, video footage, and text to depict a fire at a branch of Woolworths in Manchester in 1979, in which ten people died. Richard Dormant at the Telegraph describes the work as "the most viscerally exciting work of art I’ve seen since Christian Marclay’s 'The Clock’" and calls it "20 of the most exhilarating minutes I’ve ever spent in an art gallery." Adrian Searle at the Guardian said that the "focus and drive of Price's work, the cutting and the atmosphere, mark her out."