The controversy about tonight's Turner Prize ceremony was that there was no controversy. After pickled animals, elephant dung and flickering light-bulbs, the Tate’s judges this time decided to award the £25,000 prize to an artist who knows which way up to hold a paint-brush.

Tomma Abts became the first female painter to win Britain’s most provocative and prestigious contemporary art award since it was founded in 1984.

The last painter to take the prize was Chris Ofili in 1998, but he managed to be controversial by attaching blobs of dung to his canvases.

Abts, a 38-year-old artist who was born in Kiel, Germany, and who now lives in London, was picked for intricate abstracts in acrylic and oil, which all measure 48 by 38 centimetres.

While some critics likened her paintings to minor abstract art of the 1920s and said that they made 1950s wallpaper look like profound works of art, others were seduced by their zig-zagging, geometric, curvaceous patterns.

The judges, chaired by Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, felt that they enriched the language of abstract painting. They admired her works as “compelling images”, insisting that they “reveal their complexity slowly over time”.

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