British Artist Fiona Banner’s Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron at Galerie Barbara Thumm

BERLIN.- Fiona Banner’s practice centres on the problems and possibilities of language, both written and metaphorical. From her ‘wordscapes’ to her use of found and transformed military aircraft, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy, attraction and alienation.

In this exhibition the artist alternates between the pathos of battle in her monumental sculptures, and the gentle humour of her works on paper, as she looks at how we mythologize ourselves and our history, and our willingness to be seduced by our own myths.

The title of the show is taken from a 1966 hit song, which describes the battle between Snoopy and World War 1 flying ace The Red Baron. The song music was never published for legal reasons; Snoopy’s owners sued the band over use of his name. For this show, Banner has created sheet music re-interpreting the original pop song, turning it into an annotated fugue.

Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts with his star character Snoopy was born of a booming, paranoid, post-war culture. His universe is populated by beings who anthropomorphize the parts of ourselves that we constantly grapple with, but ultimately fail to understand.

As well as being a Beagle, Snoopy is a World War 1 flying ace, a little boy’s pet, and an aspiring great novelist. Snoopy wants to become The Red Baron, and is obsessed with killing him but he knows that the Baron exists only in his mind, a heroicised representation of fear.

The real Red Baron, German fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918) was eventually shot down in combat and died from a single bullet to the heart. He famously delighted in killing, shooting down eighty planes during the war, more than any other pilot. On news of his death souvenir hunters stripped his plane of its parts. Richthofen was legendary in his own lifetime, partly thanks to wartime propaganda, and mythologized posthumously. He was buried in the Invalidenfriedhof Cemetery in Berlin.

In the gallery, Banner’s sculpture Wing, 2011 made from the wing of a Tornado fighter plane, stands upended and statuesque. It too is anthropomorphized. Stripped back and polished to a mirror finish, the wing reflects the viewer back at themselves.

Banners graphite works, fifty drawn and rebound dummy figure drawing manuals, Life Drawing Drawings 2007-2011, also reference our relationship with our own image. Yet here it is the books that have been drawn, not the human figure. This parody, with its allusions to the romantic notion of the artist, references Banner’s previous text works.

Banner has worked directly with the nude, making verbal descriptions, and staging performances in which she recreates the formal architecture of the life room, looking not only at the act of observation, but also at the act of creation, both parodying it and yet revealing new intimacies. Banner once said, “Every life drawing, good or bad is an attempt to stall time for long enough to make some kind of reflection, assert some kind of control over our own mortality, in a way that is absurdly literal but also tender”.

The books, with their empty pages, allude to drawings unmade and biographies unwritten. Like Snoopy’s unrequited quest to be a great novelist these books are our own unwritten portraits, constantly in flux.

Fiona Banner, born 1966 in Britain graduated from Goldsmiths College London in 1993. Her works are exhibited in renowned international museums, including in collections at The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Tate Gallery (London), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). In 2001 Fiona Banner was represented at the Berlin Biennial. In 2010 her installation Harrier and Jaguar was presented in The Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. In 2002 Fiona Banner was nominated for the Turner Prize. This is her fifth show at Galerie Barbara Thumm. The artist lives and works in London.

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