German critic attacks Turner prize winner 'Wallpaper'

    
German critic attacks Turner prize winner
 
 
Luke Harding in Berlin
Thursday December 7, 2006
The Guardian
 
British critics have queued up to praise her work but yesterday Tomma Abts - the German-born winner of the 2006 Turner prize - was attacked by her country's leading art critic, who said her paintings looked like east German "wallpaper".

Abts had virtually no profile in Germany, he said, adding that her paintings looked "like pattern samples from an old German Democratic Republic wallpaper factory". They were, he added, little more than "elegant lurchings".

The German gallery that exhibits Abts' tiny abstract paintings defended her work yesterday. Giti Nourbakhsch gallery in Berlin said it had a long waiting list because of her art. The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung called her "the new star of the international art scene".