The Threadneedle Prize at the Mall Galleries

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The Turner Prize is 25 years old this autumn and has been won only once by a figurative painter or sculptor - Chris Ofili in 1998. Its inclination towards the conceptual and to non-traditional media of course reflects changing patterns in art-making in the last quarter of a century. But even more it reflects a prejudice at Tate, one of the world's most powerful arbiters of taste, against contemporary representational art.

It was to counter this bias, and to answer and reassert broad and continuing popular interest in figurative painting and sculpture, that the £25,000 Threadneedle Prize was launched at the Mall Galleries last year. This is not some reactionary Stuckist joke: organised by the Federation of British Artists, selected by a distinguished panel of judges - including Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and artists Jock McFayden and Daphne Todd - and funded by Threadneedle Investments, it is Britain's most lucrative art award. Its second presentation, opened this week, is a triumph. Combining the work of young and established names, and ranging from a two-metre crocheted upright brown bear by Shauna Richardson to Louise Balaam's tiny, luscious oil on panel close-up "Oak Tree", the exhibition of some 80 works is serious, engaging, diverse, unexpected and gives more pleasure and provocation than any Turner show of the past decade. If you have any regard for living art, go - and vote; the winner, from the judge's shortlist of seven, will be decided by public vote and announced on September 14.

All the shortlisted works are interesting and indicative of a surge of confidence in painting and sculpture as they burst free from a generation's dominance by the Young British Art movement. Two are outstanding, assured and distinctive in their striking individual expression, and of museum quality. One is Lucy Jones's airy, turbulent depiction of rounded hills and heavy skies, "Over the Hill", its luscious crimson-green-sunflower vibrations marking Jones as among the greatest English colourists, and its raw emotional energy held taut by a boldly abstracted, simplified composition. I love the awkward grace of Jones's paintings - connected, I suspect, to her own difficulties as a sufferer from cerebral palsy - and the sense she conveys of being alone within a landscape, at once liberated and overwhelmed by it.

The other, and the weirdest and most haunting piece in the show, is Belfast-born Tim Shaw's "Middle World", a sculptural installation 20 years in the making, consisting of 70 small bronze and terracotta soldiers and half-animal warriors arranged on a large stone table resembling something between a pinball machine and an altarpiece, intricately carved above with gargoyles, skulls and bomber planes, tapering off in a cluster of stalactites below. Nature and art, life and death, man-made past and technological future, are all weighed up in this superbly crafted gothic/21st-century fantasy of war and peace, its silvery sheen spotlit to illuminate "a cold glitter of souls", as Seamus Heaney described limbo.

Jones and Shaw are mid-career practitioners who have trodden a solitary path: a win for either would lend gravitas to the Threadneedle Prize, as well as to the artist. I also admired the zany diptych of two fat banker types, "The Manufacturers", full of comic energy, by the oldest name on the shortlist, 75-year-old Rose Wylie. Its source was a photograph on the front page of The New York Times showing a pair of businessmen-diplomats, representing the US apologising to the Chinese for the toxic paint on Mattel toys. Emphatic, slashing brushwork points to paint as the central issue in the news item but, joining a play of styles - cartoon animation, antique, fresco-like flatness, naive storytelling - gorgeously muddled across a three-metre canvas, the painterliness is part too of Wylie's witty questioning of modernist stratagems.

So much of this show leads to a meditation on the conundrums of painting: depth and surface, light and shade, line and colour. Also on the shortlist, Melanie Miller's oil-on-gesso panel "Green Hydrangea", the head of the flower suspended on a black ground, is so subtly layered and quiet as to slow down the process of looking. It made me recall Bonnard's ideal that "the work of art is a stop in time". And among younger contenders, Jaemi Hardy's small oil "Clara with Chinese Horse" is based on compelling draughtsmanship and is remarkable for its tonal nuances and restrained balance between remoteness and immediacy. In a show alive with debates about the portraiture tradition, Hardy's full-frontal head of artist Clara Drummond, a poised, alert young woman, hair swept back above a high brow and wide, concentrated eyes answering our gaze with dizzying steadiness, has something of the mystery and freshness of Renaissance likenesses, at once inviting us to intimacy yet asserting the unknowability of the Other.

Almost half the works in the exhibition are portraits. There is a plurality of styles but certain contemporary influences are pronounced. The crystalline exposure of flesh, derived from Lucian Freud, is a trap for many lesser talents: the best take on it here is another shortlisted painting, Sheila Wallis's curled-up nude "Self-portrait" on a bed of dirty rumpled sheets. This is a work of sharp scrutiny, turning on the vulnerability of exposure, but without Freud's savagery. James Lloyd's "Self-portrait", the artist caught in the act of intense looking, also recalls Freud's solemn authenticity, as does Lloyd's glacially precise interior of his workplace, "Union Street Studio", its bleak emptiness relieved by a mirror that plays with space and suggests life beyond.

John Currin's shrill, elongated harpies are another background presence, touched too, though in a different way from Freud, with Old Master allusions - notably in Sara Le Roy's "Sandra" and Simon Casson's "The Thesmophoria III"; so is hyper-realism, at the monumental scale made celebrated by Jenny Saville. Oliver Jones describes his massive wrinkled head "#93971", in coloured chalk on paper, as "re-advertising and forensically examining the facial field of Joe Bloggs"; Louis Smith's larger-than-life-size "St Peter on the Cross", also shortlisted, is a ghoulish tour de force of Caravaggio-esque suffering crossed with contemporary photo-realism.

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More malign is the influence of Jeff Koons among too many vulgar domestic ornaments transformed into knowing kitsch: Beverley Porter's glazed earthenware "Sloth"; Alli Sharma's oil on board "Donkey"; Cathie Pilkington's soft-porn jesomite sculptures "Nice to Meet You"; and "Flopsy", which the artist describes as "Beatrix Potter meets turn of the century German erotica".

Landscape painting, which has had a lower profile than portraiture for a century, is perhaps less overshadowed, though a significant echo is the work of Peter Doig, whose skill and rigour has licensed a generation to consider well-constructed prettiness. Bella Easton's attractive large oil on linen "Dream on Dream Home", in which a south London nightscape is filtered through a lattice of dark trees and branches, reminded me of Doig's connections between image and pattern; Zachary Pierce's "Pripyat, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 1", has an architectonic splendour crossed with a mood of decay and threat.

This is a vibrant opening to London's autumn season. Will the Threadneedle alter the fortunes of figurative art, or change public patronage or taste? 2008's Turner Prize shortlist was widely condemned as the most trivial and dull on record. I wonder if it is a coincidence that, within a year of the Threadneedle launch, the Turner Prize shortlist for 2009 includes, for the first time since 1991, not a single video, installation or photographic artist - and instead an emphasis on those who make as well as think, in an intriguing shortlist of two painters, a sculptor and a draughtsman. Tate's Turner show opens next month; what is certain is that the times they are a changin', and the Threadneedle has a part in that drama.

The Threadneedle Prize, Mall Galleries, London SW1, to September 19www.threadneedleprize.com

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