Fiona Banner

Fiona Banner, aka The Vanity Press, was born in 1966, in Merseyside, North West England. In 1993 she finished her MA at Goldsmiths College, and the next year she held her first solo exhibition at City Racing. At the 46th Venice Biennale in 1994, Banner and Damien Hirst were included with the Young British Artists, a group known for revitalizing the British art scene.

Her early work took the form of wordscapes—detailed accounts describing feature films such as Point Break. In 1997, she founded The Vanity Press, through which she published her own works, such as Nam, a 1,000-page book which describes the plots of six Vietnam films in their entirety. Since then she has published many works, some in the form of books, some sculptural, some performance based. Humour, conflict and language are at the core of her work.

Following her shows at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Banner was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002. The wall of her show in the Turner Prize exhibition at was dominated by an advertising billboard entitled Arsewoman in Wonderland, a written description of a pornographic film.

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. Other recent exhibitions include: Night at the Museum, Swansea, Wales (2019); Runway AW17, De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2017); Buoys Boys, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2016); Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2015); and Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2014)

While Banner’s work includes sculpture, drawing and installation; text is the core of her oeuvre. She has also treated the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films.

She lives and works in London.