Jesse Darling’s exuberant meditation on Britain’s borders is the right winner of this year’s Turner Prize

There’s a sense of infectious excitement and raw enthusiasm in Darling’s unfettered manipulation of physical stuff, writes Mark Hudson

Darling’s work has a wild, kinetic energy that makes the other contenders’ work feel staid (Angus Mill )

Jesse Darling has won this year’s £25,000 Turner Prize with an exhilarating sculptural installation on the subject of borders, in what promises to be a popular decision on the part of the judges. The 41-year-old, Berlin-based artist was not only the critics’ favourite, pretty much across the board, but was to my mind the only serious contender in an odd shortlist.

Yet Turner Prize juries have shown themselves determined to do the unexpected thing in recent years – from allowing the four shortlistees to share the prize in 2019 to choosing the dullest of four pretty dire art collectives in 2021. So I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d chosen another of this year’s shortlisted artists out of sheer, well, perversity.

Veteran Black British artist Barbara Walker’s drawn-on-the-wall tribute to the Windrush Generation would certainly have been a popular choice. Exhibiting the documents that her elderly subjects were asked to provide to the authorities during the horrific Windrush scandal provides a powerful context for her dignified, wall-filling charcoal portraits. Yet the portraits themselves feel too conventional and illustrative, and too obviously done from photographs, to truly move as works of art.