The announcement of the Turner Prize shortlist, made yesterday by Tate Britain, is always a much-talked-about event in the art world, annually garnering strong opinions and outspoken criticisms. But these days the British press is hard-pressed to muster the same kind of cliché shock that characterized its coverage of the 1990s nominations, when the prize, established to honor British or British-based artists under 50 who have exhibited in the previous year, was still relatively new (it was founded in 1984). Recent years have seen jurors favor more serious and conceptual practitioners, with previous winners including Mark Leckey (2008), Mark Wallinger (2007), Tomma Abts (2006), and Simon Starling (2005). This year’s jury, comprised of TV broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, critic Jonathan Jones, curator Andrea Schlieker, and director of the Netherlands’ Van Abbemuseum, Charles Esche, has done likewise, reportedly making their decision in only six hours.

Unlike 2008, when the shortlist favored video and installation art, this year’s choices — Italian-born Enrico David, Brit Roger Hiorns, and Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright, both of whom are Glasgow-based Brits — represent a shift toward the traditional, focused as they are on craft and technique. Still, with an award of £25,000 ($36,940) going to the winner, and £5,000 to each of the shortlisted artists, the Turner is inevitably a prize that conjures up immense debate (for what it is worth, this writer would have put money on Charles Avery and Ryan Gander appearing in the nominations) and discussion of its wider significance.

Here, to help spur that discussion, ARTINFO provides the lowdown on the four competitors:

Enrico David
Italian-born David, 43, works across mediums to produce highly stylized, graphic-led work that owes a lot to the theatricality of Art Deco and the Italian carnivalesque. The work is easy to engage with aesthetically, with clean, straight lines and blocks of color, yet the artist’s subject matter is far from sentimental or nostalgic, with frequent sexual and violent undertones.

Roger Hiorns
Any work that requires visitors to wear protective boots to view it is sure to make a lasting impression. This was the case with 34-year-old Hiorns’s 2008 installation Seizure, in which the artist covered the entire interior of a small, soon-to-be-demolished social housing flat with copper sulphate. This, in turn, crystallized blue, creating a grotto at once magical and disturbing. Central to the artist’s practice is a study of the physical versatility of materials, as when he ground a passenger jet engine into sculptural piles of dust in an untitled 2008 work.

Lucy Skaer
Skaer, 34, the only woman on the shortlist, sources her initial subject matter from newspaper, magazine, and book imagery. She then works and reworks the aesthetic components of these pictures (colors, shapes) into intriguing, sometimes dark, diagrammatic forms that appear in paintings, sculptures, and films — or in installations combining all three. In doing so, she converts her subject matter from the easily recognizable imagery of the found pictures into an exploration of the difficulty of comprehending abstract forms.

Richard Wright
Wright, 39, is the most established of the shortlisted artists, with representation by Gagosian Gallery and works in MoMA, Tate, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego collections, among others. His trademark is to apply geometric patterns of paint or gold leaf directly onto gallery walls, resulting in works that heighten the viewer’s awareness of the architecture of a space while contrasting the building’s permanence with the temporary nature of the art.