Showcasing divergence, four artists are styles apart

This is a hugely unexpected Turner Prize shortlist, suggesting a jury with divergent tastes. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, Turner Prize exhibitions are often at their best when showcasing a wide range of artistic media.

Even the two painters are stylistically far apart. Dexter Dalwood creates luxuriously painterly mash-ups that filter recent history through the art of the past in depicting the sites of Slobodan Milosevic's atrocities or the death of UN weapons inspector David Kelly.

Angela de la Cruz makes abstract paintings and then manipulates them, crumpling them or crashing them over furniture. She often gives them titles such as Ashamed or Homeless and the resulting works have a human quality, like wounded or deflated bodies.

Susan Philipsz's haunting work is normally encountered in evocative locations - her a cappella versions of songs might be heard underneath a bridge or in a harbour. The Otolith Group are this year's wild card. The cerebral duo's eponymous trilogy of "film-essays" fuses science fiction with tough social commentary, and includes original and archive footage, ranging from images of the first woman to orbit the earth and anti-Iraq war protests in London to Mumbai slums.

It's an intriguing shortlist and notably all the artists are in their forties. I would have liked to see younger artists such as abstract sculptor Karla Black and painter Stuart Cumberland on the list. But of this group of four, I'd like De la Cruz to win.