– at ISelf Collection, The end of love, Gallery 7, Whitechapel Gallery.
The last gallery we visit, I am tired, Cally Spooner’s piece in the gallery/corridor just earlier left me frazzled. This one is full of paintings, I almost step right back out through the door but see some monochrome photography to the right and stay.
This I notice late, even though it’s possibly the biggest piece in the room. I start reading, read the description, see it’s a woman who made it, the continue reading.
I think of Bethan Huws’ Lake writing (again), and marvel at the verbal, in capital letters description of a female nude model, standing.
I read this commentary on a different artwork in the Nude Standing series (2006-) and wonder if just missed that fighter planer underneath the text description:
If Banner’s new works are (deeply, warily) engaged with canonical painting both figurative and abstract, they also extend longstanding interests of Banner’s own. Nude Standing (2006)–which, naturally, occupies a vertical sheet of paper (and, moreover, was stood upright on the floor at the 4th Street space, its frame held in place by wire tied to eye hooks in the ceiling)–is more than just descriptive text. Beneath the handwritten portrait is a faint, spray-painted gray image of part of the tail fin of a fighter plane. Under the circumstances, it is easy to mistake for the slope of a woman’s shoulder. But in other new work, Banner reverses the emphasis to focus on the aircraft.
Princenthal, 2006, review of Nude/Parade, at http://www.fionabanner.com/words/nancyprincenthal2006.htm
— I did not read the text in toto in the gallery, it felt too intimate to do so in public — and I think that is what intrigues me most in this: the huge scale (also mirroring some concerns over bigger, better as in the Thomas Ruff show we came to see) and then the close observation, the verbalising of a presence, a practice that is visual, a language over discussing life painting/drawing while doing it as one focused on technique, attentive to not veer into the erotic (but of course I am talking about public classes, sessions, I am not talking about the private arrangements between model and artist).
I didn’t know Fiona Banner’s work before.
Here is her website: http://www.fionabanner.com
The entry at the Tate website: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/fiona-banner-2687
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