Art review: Turner Prize 2011, Baltic, Newcastle

This is a melancholy show, from Martin Boyce’s windswept library, in which a few leaves from his 2009 exhibition for the Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale appear to have blown in with the draught, to George Shaw’s paintings of boarded-up shops. Film-maker Hilary Lloyd looks at the moon and Karla Black, who represented Scotland in Venice in 2011, has presented a beautiful room of painterly sculptures, which seem elegantly faded and purposefully tentative, as well as characteristically exuberant.

All of this is a good thing. The prize this year looks like an exhibition rather than the wearisome cattle market it can become. The gallery spaces at BALTIC are richer than those customarily used at Tate Britain. They come with complications, a pillar here and there, a bank of windows, that impose demands on the artists which enhance the work rather than detract from it.

For Scottish viewers this show will be seen as yet another triumph for artists with Glasgow School of Art training or Glaswegian family origins after a steady stream of Glasgow nominees throughout the last decade turned into prize-winners Simon Starling, Richard Wright and Susan Philipsz.

Martin Boyce’s room is a liminal space, somewhere between inside and out, landscape and interior, sculpture and installation. The complex design references and the unique typography which came to fruition in his vast show for Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2009 continue to be honed.

A scratched library table skulks in the half light created by sheltering the gallery lights behind a suspended ceiling composed of powder coated aluminium “leaves”. The pillars in the gallery are like trees, the ceiling both forest canopy and modern, modular interior design. The ventilation grills, placed low on the gallery walls, are a long-standing sculptural motif. They aren’t functional, a piece of understated theatrics, further muddying the waters about whether this a real place or an elaborate set and suggesting a chill wind. There are paper leaves scattered on the floor throughout the gallery. Created for Venice, they indicated in that show an abandoned garden; here they provide a paranoid sense that everything a library table might represent is potentially permeable and therefore vulnerable.

Karla Black’s work is often described as vulnerable, and the team at Baltic explained that the vast mountains of chalk-coated sugar paper that fill her gallery would probably be destroyed when they are moved, but the work Doesn’t Care In Words is defiantly strong, reaching up to scratch the ceiling, dipping down to scrape the floor. There are puffy clouds of cellophane and Sellotape, vast alpine sweeps of paper in pale blue and green. Unusually for Black, you can enter into this work, stepping behind a yellow-coated crag into a cave which has walls like coiled intestines.

There is complex artistic language here about surface and depth, invitation and repulsion, but Black is in control at every step, from the cellophane sheets, coated in paint and cream, powder and vaseline that block your entry to the gallery, to the mini-marks, like tiny paintings of flowers that occasionally punctuate her surfaces.

Next door Hilary Lloyd, who has a long established career in moving image work, has created a hypnotic installation out of the tension between her methods and her subjects, the latter of which are mundane: a floor, a tower block, the pattern of a man’s shirt. This might be dry as dust stuff, but Lloyd’s chunky industrial installation aesthetic, where none of the technology is hidden, is muscular and compelling and her film Moon is a lovely, ever-shifting evocation of lunar power.

In the past I have often found George Shaw’s immaculate landscape paintings of his native Tile Hill estate in Coventry a little tiresome. The four new works on show here are palpably angry. Shut Up is a scene of a shuttered shop. The New Houses shows a more generic scene than usual, a Barrett-type estate, glowing pink in the distance but fenced off and surrounded by a sea of mud.

Despite the risk of nostalgia, there is perhaps a certain noble persistence to them that becomes more compelling as economics get more desperate.

It is, of course, time to make predictions. Since Penelope Curtis, new director of Tate Britain, took over as chair of the prize, there has been a far greater emphasis on the original works for which the artists were nominated, rather than the show itself. Nevertheless, all four have risen to the occasion, the two Scots in particular, and I can’t recall feeling less certain or more torn.

Boyce has long been cheated of a prize that should have been his almost a decade ago. Shaw has been touted as the popular choice. Lloyd is a brilliant outsider. Karla Black, the bookies’ favourite, told reporters on opening day that she didn’t want to win. But surely this is her moment.

• Until 8 January. The winner will be announced at BALTIC on 5 December