Melancholy beauty marks out worthy Turner winner

New Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce is among the most cerebral of artists to win the award.

His installations riff on modernist design, which sounds dry, but Boyce manages to produce distinctly poetic environments from a range of carefully crafted materials.

The Turner Prize show, like most of Boyce's recent work, takes as a starting point cubist concrete trees originally designed in the Twenties by French artists Joël and Jan Martel, playing on their structure to create a wealth of forms, from the tiny origami-like leaves which float around the floor, to the hanging metal canopy whose art deco-ish pattern throws intriguing shadows on the gallery walls.

At his best, Boyce creates atmospheric dreamscapes, which remind me of parks or playgrounds on modernist estates, and yet possess a serene, melancholy beauty.

He is a worthy winner of the Prize, in what he described last night as a "brilliant shortlist to be part of". It marks a remarkable treble for Glasgow. After Richard Wright in 2009 and Susan Philipsz last year, Boyce becomes the third artist in a row either based or schooled in the city to win the prize.

Accepting the award at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Boyce, 44, mentioned the "amazing, supportive peer group" he found at Glasgow School of Art in the late Eighties which included 1996 Turner winner Douglas Gordon and 2007 nominee Nathan Coley.

They were the first of a series of artists to emerge from a radical course in "Environmental Art", and the city has never looked back since, producing wave after wave of top-class artists, not least Karla Black, who joined Boyce on this year's shortlist.

It was indeed an excellent year. Hilary Lloyd's sparely presented videos with collaged images of urban imagery, and Black's installations using domestic materials such as bath bombs and make-up to play with the language of Sixties American abstract painting, might have taken the prize.

I hoped George Shaw would win. Like Boyce's work, Shaw's paintings of the Tile Hill estate near Coventry are richly potent in atmosphere.

Rendered in exquisite detail using Humbrol enamel paint, the images are seemingly ordinary and yet, absent of people, cars and life, they have a brooding, almost ghostly feel.

Let's hope the shortlist is this good when the prize returns to Tate Britain next year.