Turner prize 2009: Meet the artists

Born in Ancona, Italy, 43-year-old Enrico David studied sculpture at St Martin's college, London, and crafts highly stylised installations, often using drawing as his starting point Photograph: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin

Bulbous Marauder, 2008. The ICA hosted David's first solo show in 2007, with the Guardian's Jonathan Jones - on this year's Turner panel, as it happens - awarding it five stars. Jones said: 'he is a brilliant and authentically creative stylist who has digested everything from Venice carnival to Picasso's 1920s classical period, late Malevich, Joe Orton and Francis Bacon - and transforms it all into something unpleasantly new' Photograph: Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin

How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy?, 2009. Jones wasn't the only one dazzled by the 'perverse wit' of the show: the Evening Standard declared David to be 'one of the most intriguing artists working in Britain today' Photograph: Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin

The second artist, Roger Hiorns, is one of two 34-year-olds on the shortlist, an alumnus of Goldsmiths college, London Photograph: Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

IBM (15 x 10), 2000. Hiorns works with all manner of unlikely materials – copper sulphate crystals, detergent, perfume – to create ambitious, inventive site-specific works that aim to disrupt the viewer's understanding of how each space might work, or 'perform', as he puts it Photograph: Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

Vauxhall, 2003. This work saw Hiorns place a grate into the surface of Tate Britain's Sculpture Court and then set fire to its liquid contents. The Guardian's Adrian Searle has described him as 'an artist of emissions, of excesses, of the uncontrollable' Photograph: Tate Photography, David Lambert/Rod Tidman /Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

Seizure, 2008. This installation, commissioned by influential public art group Artangel, transformed the interior of a condemned bedsit into a sparkling blue cocoon with 90,000 litres of liquid copper sulphate, , drawing visitors clad in rubber gloves and boots to a dilapidated corner of south London Photograph: Marcus Leith/Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

Seizure, 2008. The Daiy Telegaph described the work as 'sensual, inexplicable and perverse', and Hiorns himself as 'one of the most original voices in contemporary British art' Photograph: Marcus Leith/Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

Glasgow-based Lucy Skaer, 34, often uses photography as the basis of her work but is probably best known for her playful public installations Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh

Black Alphabet, 2008. Skaer has secreted moth and butterfly pupae in London's Old Bailey in the hope that they hatched mid-trial, and left a scorpion resting alongside a diamond on an Amsterdam pavement. She is also a member of the Henry VIII's Wives art collective who have worked together in Belgrade, Austria and Spike Island Photograph: Serge Hasenböhler/Courtesy of the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh

Solid Ground - Liquid to Solid in 85 years, 2006. She says: 'my work explores the movement of images, and plays with the degree to which they are separate from first hand-experience' Photograph: Serge Hasenböhler/Courtesy of the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh

The Siege, 2008. Of her show last year at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket gallery, one critic said: 'there is a great deal to see, and to admire ... but it doesn't make for easy viewing' Photograph: Andy Keate /Courtesy of the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh

Richard Wright, 49, is another Glasgow-based artist, who creates epic (albeit short-lived) paintings on gallery walls Photograph: Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, London/New York and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Untitled, 2005. Wright uses an improvisatory techniques to create painstakingly intricate works that are too large to see in total up close, but too detailed to decipher from a distance Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist Pension Trust, Gagosian Gallery, and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd

No Title, 2007. Wright's first solo show took place at Transmission gallery, Glasgow, in 1994 and he now has works in the permanent collections of Moma, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art and Tate Photograph: Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, London/New York and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Not titled, 2005 . Wright believes the power of his work lies in its 'possibility to affect or change the way you are drawn through the space' and 'therefore has the potential to reveal the space in an a new aspect' Photograph: Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, London/New York and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow