While the work of Fiona Banner, an English artist renowned for her conceptual sculptures and her text-centric, monumental ‘wordscapes’, is often exhibited in museums and featured in contemporary art galleries across the globe, she has opted to take a different approach for a new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery: Fiona Banner selects from the V-A-C collection: Stamp Out Photographie.  

In an effort to expose important artworks in rarely seen or overlooked collections around the world, the Whitechapel Gallery has introduced several programmes presenting various works from the V-A-C Collection, an accumulation of art owned by the V-A-C Foundation, a non-profit institution.  This series of shows is comprised of four displays, and began earlier this year.   

For this exciting edition, Fiona has chosen several, seldom-displayed works from Moscow’s Collection, spanning prominent artists such as Claude Monet, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter. While the pieces seem to comprise a highly eclectic selection, Banner has included them for very distinctive reasons:

“The works that I was drawn to are self reflective, they challenge their own medium: paintings that discuss themselves as reproduction; photographs that deny the image or perform some kind of act of self portraiture; sculpture that declares the impossibility of its own authenticity - each work slumped in the psychiatrist’s chair, holding a mirror up to itself”.

With this cognitive focus and introspective approach, it becomes clear that Stamp Out Photographie presents a unique, conceptually cohesive, and much-deserved look at a rarely seen collection.

Don’t miss Fiona Banner selects from the V-A-C collection: Stamp Out Photographie at London’s Whitechapel Galleryfrom 9 December 2014 – 8 March 2015!