Organisers of the Turner Prize for modern art, won in recent years by a transvestite potter, a flickering light and a pile of elephant dung, broke with tradition with this year's shortlist announced today: they nominated an artist who uses oil on canvas.

Gillian Carnegie, a 34-year-old Londoner, uses the traditional painterly genres of landscape, still life, the nude and portraiture. She has exhibited in New York, Berlin and New York but was shortlisted by the Turner Prize jury for her solo exhibition at Cabinet, a London gallery.

In case she sounds a little too conventional, the Turner Prize background notes on the painter say: "Carnegie strikes an exquisite tension between the subject matter and the materiality of her medium. This is perhaps taken to its ultimate extreme in landscapes such as Black Square 2002, at first glance an impenetrable monochrome black mass. On closer inspection a woodland scene reveals itself, almost painted in relief and containing a surprising amount of colour. "

Up against Carnegie will be two installation artists, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling, and Darren Almond, who has displayed bus stops he saw outside the Auschwitz Museum in Poland in a gallery in Berlin and also uses film and photography.

Almond, also 34, is an artist preoccupied with the themes of time, geography and memory, who creates "minimal yet emotionally charged works that meditate on time, space and human experience".

Lambie, 41, and Starling, 38, are both Glasgow-based installation artists, although with widely differing styles.

Lambie uses everyday ephemera to make striking and colourful installations and is best known for his Zobop series of psychedelic floor coverings made of multi-coloured vinyl tape. He is also well known in Glasgow as a musician and DJ.

Another surprise about the award this year is its presentation. The organisers are assembling a virtual tour of the Turner Prize at mainline UK train stations in the hope of bringing the shortlist to a new audience.

The prize has previously thrown up controversial winners such as Damien Hirst, best known for his pickled shark, Chris Ofili, who incorporates elephant dung into some of his paintings, and the transvestite potter Grayson Perry. Last year’s winner was Jeremy Deller, who created a film about President George Bush’s hometown and re-enacted a pitched battle from the 1984 miners’ strike.

The Turner Prize is awarded to a British artist under the age of 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of his or her work in the previous year. All shortlisted artists are invited to present work in the prize show, which starts on October 18 and the winner is announced on December 5.

The chairman of the judging panel, and director of the Tate gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota, said at today’s announcement: "The shortlist shows the extraordinary depth of both experience and talent in British art."