The Turner Prize celebrates its 40th year in 2024 – the prize was first awarded in 1984, to artist Malcom Morley, for two oil paintings inspired by a trip to Greece. That win sparked controversy as Morley had been living in New York for more than 20 years – and the Turner Prize hasn’t really stopped provoking the public since.

The Turner Prize represents the changing landscape of British contemporary art in many ways. This year, the exhibition returns to Tate Britain, and the shortlist – announced earlier this year – features four fascinating artists: Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, and Delaine Le Bas. It’s a scintillating and diverse mix this year, from Le Bas’s savagely beautiful, throbbing immersive installation to the quiet, classical beauty of Johnson’s large-scale paintings and drawings. “All four of them make work that is full of life. They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details. In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever”, Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain and Chair of the Turner Prize jury says.

The Turner Prize 2024 jury is comprised of Rosie Cooper, Director of Wysing Arts Centre, Ekow Eshun, Sam Thorne, Director General and CEO at Japan House London and Lydia Yee, curator and art historian. The winner will be announced on December 3rd.

As the days start to draw in and the sky fades to grey, a welcome retreat can be found in a neon-bright retrospective of Sir Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts, a romp through the artist’s 60 year career, taking in sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, prints and digital works that enliven the main galleries with Craig-Martin’s signature use of spectacular colour. It is the largest exhibition of the Irish artist’s work to be held in the UK to date.

Always blurring boundaries and adding a dose of irony to his art, Craig-Martin has fused various elements from graphic design, pop, minimalism and conceptual art since the 1960s. There is a room devoted to Craig-Martin’s early experiments with sculpture – such as his breakthrough 1973 piece, An Oak Tree: a glass of water poised on a glass shelf, with an explanation of why it is an oak tree. There are also plenty of examples of his bold, brightly-coloured acrylic paintings of desultory everyday objects and the trappings of modern life.

Craig-Martin, 83, is also revered as an educator – he began teaching in 1966, and in the 1980s taught a cohort of artists at Goldsmiths that included Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. The exhibition culminates in a new site-specific work, an immersive digital video piece, Cosmos, signalling Craig-Martin’s desire to keep exploring new mediums. “I did think that the chance to do a retrospective show of this scale in the UK was gone, but here it is.” The artist told the Guardian in an interview. “It could hardly be later, but, in another way, it’s happening at exactly the right time.”