A few inches of broomstick, a fancy cake and what looks like a rolled bin liner are among the official highlights of this year’s Summer Exhibition, unveiled yesterday at the Royal Academy in London.

The show, in its 239th year, is the world’s largest open submission exhibition and attracts contributions from amateur painters, as well as some of the best known artists alive.

This year about 13,000 works were submitted to the Academy in Piccadilly, including many traditional watercolour landscapes and classical, figurative portraits alongside more conceptual pieces.

After a complex selection process, these have been whittled down to about 1,200 works from which several panels of judges have nominated their favourite works.

Gavin Turk’s Dumb Candle, a sculpture of a candle made from the end of a broomstick, and Gary Hume’s untitled work combining furled black plastic on a sheet of glistening aluminium, are two of the six pieces shortlisted for the £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award for the “most distinguished work” in the exhibition.

Bill Woodrow, the sculptor and Royal Academy member who was on the judging panel, said that both works were indicative of the the venerable institution’s more progressive direction in recent years. “The membership of the academy is changing all the time, with new members arriving with new ideas,” he said. “The majority of members really want the place to be up to date.”

Turk’s candle, which is less than 12 cms (5ins) tall and is for sale at £10,575, picks up on “lots of art historical references”, he said.

“The candle must be one of the oldest symbols of life and I personally like this very much because of its absolute simplicity.

“I enjoy thinking about how the artist got from a broom handle to a candle and made it look convincing rather than silly. It seems to be quite meaningful.”

The black plastic in Hume’s work (priced at £70,000) “is not a bin-liner”, Woodrow said. “It is the protective film you find on the front polished surface of a sheet of aluminium to prevent it from scratching.

“He has peeled this back and then screwed it up into three dimensional forms to make a beautiful object. It’s asking a lot of questions about how you make work.”

So is Rachel Mount’s elaborate I Just Have to Have You Here a Little Longer, a delicate dressing table and cushioned stool made from “rich boozy fruitcake coated in marzipan and icing sugar”.

Under the table are boxes of sweets and mice. Everything is made from cake, sugar paste and food colouring. It costs £16,236.

Joe Bampton’s Corridor, Friedrich Strasse 112A, Berlin, uses cardboard boxes, plaster, sticking tape, string and spotlights to create a haunting model of a Stasi interrogation chamber during the Cold War.

Mount and Bampton have been nominated for the Insight Investment Newcomer’s Prize, a £10,000 prize awarded to first-time exhibitors, voted for by the public.

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