Fiona Banner

Fiona Banner (born 1966), also known as The Vanity Press, is a British artist. Her work encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation and text, and demonstrates a long-standing fascination with the emblem of fighter aircraft and their role within culture and especially as presented on film. She is well known for her early works in the form of 'wordscapes', written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in Hollywood war films, including Top Gun and Apocalypse Now. Her work has been exhibited in prominent international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Hayward Gallery, London. Banner was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002.

Life 2010 Tate Britain exhibition of an RAF Jaguar installed by Banner. Fiona Banner was born on Merseyside, North West England in 1966. She studied at Kingston University and completed her MA at Goldsmiths College of Art in 1993. The next year she held her first solo exhibition at City Racing. Since graduating from Goldsmiths College of Art, Banner has continued to evolve an important, considered and interrelated practice, rooted in language. Publishing, in the broadest sense, is central to her practice.

In 1995, she was included in General Release: Young British Artists held at the XLVI Venice Biennale.

In 1997, when she published THE NAM, she started working under the imprint of The Vanity Press, and has since published an extensive archive of books, objects and performances, many questioning the notion of authorship and copyright. For Banner, the act of publishing is itself a performative one. Consequently, her work resits traditional notions of grandeur and exclusivity, instead deploying a pseudo formality that is playful and provocative. The prize was won that year by Lancastrian artist Keith Tyson.

In 2009 she issued herself an International Standard Book Number , and registered herself as a publication under her own name. She was then photographed with the ISBN tattooed on her lower back.

In 2010, she was selected to create the 10th Duveen Hall commission at Tate Britain for which she transformed and displayed two decommissioned Royal Air Force fighter jets.

On 1 October 2010, in an open letter to the British government's culture secretary Jeremy Hunt—co-signed by a further 27 previous Turner prize nominees, and 19 winners—Banner opposed any future cuts in public funding for the arts. In the letter the cosignatories described the arts in Britain as a "remarkable and fertile landscape of culture and creativity."

Banner’s work includes sculpture, drawing and installation; text is the core of her oeuvre. She is one of the "key names", along with Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gary Hume, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tacita Dean and Douglas Gordon,

Other works

Onyx, Bookman, Courier 2018 Full stop inflatables (Installation Breeder, Athens) SS19 The Walk (and Buoys Boys) 2018 High definition digital film (Installation Breeder, Athens) SS19 The Walk 2018 Performed at DRAFx: An Evening of Performances (o2 Kentish Town Forum, London) Buoys Boys 2016, Full Stop inflatables, Sculptural performance (De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-sea) Buoys Boys 2016, High definition digital film STAMP OUT PHOTOGRAPHIE 2014 (V-A-C collection Whitechapel Gallery, London) 1066 2012 Wall projection (Turner Contemporary, England) The Exquisite Corpse Will Drink the Young Wine 2012 Musical Performance / Screening (The Welsh Congregational Chapel, Borough, London) Performance Nude 2010 Performance with David Salas (Claire de Rouen / Other Criteria Book Launch, London) Mirror 2007 Performance with Samantha Morton (Whitechapel Gallery, London)

Exhibitions

1994 Pushing Back The Edge of the Envelope, City Racing, London 1995 Viewing Room, Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York 1997 The Nam : 1000 page all text flick book, London Only the Lonely, Frith Street Gallery, London 1998 Art Now, Tate Britain, London LOVE DOUBLE, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin 1999 Statements, Basel Art Fair ASTERISK, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen Don't Look Back, Brooke Alexander, New York THE NAM and Related Material, Printed Matter, New York STOP, Frith Street Gallery, London 2000 Soixante-Neuf, Charles H Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver 2001 ARSEWOMAN, Murray Guy, New York ARSEWOMAN, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin Rainbow, 24/7, Hayward Gallery, London 2002 My Plinth is Your Lap, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen My Plinth is Your Lap, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee 2003 Fiona Banner, 1301PE, Los Angeles, CA 2006 Arsenal, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin Arsewoman in Wonderland, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin 2007 Peace on Earth, Tate Britain, London Every Word Unmade, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin The Bastard Word, Power Plant, Toronto 2010 The Naked Ear, Frith Street Gallery, London Harrier and Jaguar, Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010, Tate Britain, London Tornado, Co-commission by Locus+ and Great North Run Culture, 2010, Newcastle All the World's Fighter Planes, Musée d'art de Joliette, Québec 2011 Snoopy Vs The Red Baron, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin 2012 Unboxing, The Greatest Film Never Made, 1301PE, Los Angeles 2013 The Vanity Press, Summerhall, Edinburgh (Catalogue) 2014 Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield Mistah Kurtz, He Not Dead, PEER, London 2015 Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK FONT, Frith Street Gallery, London 2016 Au Cœur des Ténèbres, mfc-Michele Didier, Paris, France Buoys Boys, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK Fiona Banner, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany Fiona Banner, 1301PE, Los Angeles Study #13. Every Word Unmade, Fiona Banner, David Roberts Art Foundation, London 2017 Runway AW17, De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands 2018 Buoys Boys, Mission Gallery, Swansea, Wales 2019 Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Independent Art Fair, Barbara Thumm Gallery, New York, USA Full Sea Stop Scape, Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin, Germany 2020 PERIOD, Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands 2021 Pranayama Typhoon, Barakat Contemporary, Seoul, Korea