Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press: time, the anti-hero
1301PE is pleased to announce its sixth solo exhibition with acclaimed British artist Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press. Following on from her lauded installation at Patronato Salesiano Leone XIII during the 59th Venice Biennale and this year’s Parcours at ArtBasel, this exhibition is the North American premier for four recent bodies of work. Her films, sculptures, drawings and paintings continue to explore the meaning of the body politic and the politics of the body through a playful questioning of language.
The title work “time, the anti-hero”, a one-armed clock in which a mannequin hand marks out the hours of the day, a wry look at narrative time and the myth of the hero. These themes play out through the exhibition which also features “VULVA/VOLVO” (2025) a sculpture cast in aluminum from Tornado and Harrier (the military aircraft Banner exhibited at Tate Britain’s Duveen Commission in 2010); the film, “DISARM (portrait)” (2023) described by Banner as: ‘a gravity defiant concrete poem – which is actually more fluid than concrete’ and a series of film stills in the form of paintings. Both individually and as a collective, the work embodies our current fractured state and proposes the possibility of lubricating a language that has calcified into its opposite.
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press was born in Merseyside in 1966. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College. Selected recent solo projects and exhibitions include DISARM (landscape), CIRCA, Piccadilly Circus, London, UK (2024); DISARM, Chester Contemporary, Chester, UK (2023); Pranayama Organ, Zeppelin University, Germany (2023); Pranayama Typhoon – Soft Parts Wing Flap Fin, Hartware Medien Kunstverein Dortmund (HMKV), Germany (2022); Pranayama Typhoon, Patronato Salesiano Leone XIII, Venice, Italy (2022); P E R I O D, Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, The Netherlands (2020); Runway AW17, De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2017); Buoys Boys, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2016); Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling, IKON Gallery, Birmingham and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany (2015-2016); Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK (2014); Mistah Kurtz - He Not Dead, PEER, London, UK (2014); A Room for London, with David Kohn Architects and Artangel, Southbank Centre, London, UK (2012-13); Harrier and Jaguar, Tate Britain Duveen Commission, Tate Britain, London, UK (2010).
Banner’s film “Pranayama Typhoon” (2021) is currently on view in the exhibition PUSH THE LIMITS 2 at Fondazione Merz, Turin.