Mark Wallinger to present £60,000 Contemporary Art Society award

Mark Wallinger is to present this year’s Contemporary Art Society annual award on Monday, November 18.

Now in its fifth year, the prestigious £60,000 prize is one of the highest value contemporary art awards in the country. It is given to a British museum so that they can commission an artist of their choice to create a new work for their permanent collection.

Sculptor and video artist Mark Wallinger is renowned for his humorous and often sceptical social commentary often focusing on nationalism, royalty and the class system.

One of Charles Saatchi’s original Young British Artists, Wallinger is a two-time nominee and winner of the Turner Prize. He was the first artist to occupy Trafalgar Square’s prestigious Fourth Plinth in 1999 and is also well-known for his work State Britain (2007), a recreation at Tate Britain of Brian Haw's protest display outside Parliament.

Wallinger will present the £60,000 prize at a ceremony in The Dairy Art Centre in London, in the presence of the shortlisted artists and museums, curators and art collectors. Previous presenters of the award have included Grayson Perry, Cornelia Parker and Jeremy Deller.

The 2013 shortlist is:

- Artist Elizabeth Price for the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art

- Artist Jess Flood-Paddock for Birmingham Museums

- Artist Des Hughes for The Hepworth Wakefield

- Artist Lucy McKenzie for Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art