LONDON.- Leading British artist Fiona Banner chooses rarely seen works from the V-A-C collection by artists including Richard Avedon, Claude Monet and Sigmar Polke, on show at the Whitechapel Gallery from 9 December 2014.

Fiona Banner (b.1966) is a sculptor and artist who came to prominence with her ‘wordscapes’ series, written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in Hollywood war films. For this second display in a year long series, Banner selects works of art from the collection that blur the boundaries between photography and painting, and explore representations of reality.

Highlights of the exhibition titled Stamp Out Photographie include Gerhard Richter’s Kerze (1982), a hyper realistic painting of a single, glowing candle famously used as the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1988 album ‘Daydream Nation’. Andy Warhol’s Jackie (1964) based on photographs of Jackie Kennedy Onassis goes on display alongside Stretch (1964), a major black & white painting by Bridget Riley an optical art work which appears to shift and vibrate.

Claude Monet’s impressionist painting Church in Vétheuil (1878) is also featured in the exhibition along with Shannon Ebner’s black & white print The Leaning T ree (2002-08), a work created in response to a photograph taken by Robert Adams at Signal Hill, California in 1983. The presentation will also include a video by Russian born artist Olga Chernysheva and works by artists Liz Deschenes, Olafur Eliasson, Wade Guyton, Michael Krebber, Sherrie Levine, Rosemarie Trockel, James Welling and Christopher Williams.

Fiona Banner says, ‘ 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. ’

This exhibition highlights the V-A-C collection, Moscow, as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s programme of opening up rarely seen collections from around the world supported by Hiscox.The series of four displays, which began in September 2014, are shown in a dedicated Collections Gallery.

Two further exhibitions of works drawn from the collection will be selected in partnership with two internationally acclaimed artists, Lynette YiadomBoakye (17 March – 14 June 2015) and James Richards (23 June – 30 August 2015). Each presentation is accompanied by a unique publication devised by the guest selector.

The V-A-C collection brings together a range of important art works including sculptures, paintings and photographs from leading, internationally recognised artists such as Francis Bacon, Liz Deschenes, Natalia Goncharova, Wade Guyton, Wassily Kandinsky, Lucy McKenzie, Amedeo Modigliani, Sigmar Polke to Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Egon Schiele, Dayanita Singh and Christopher Wool.

The collection is owned by the V-A-C Foundation, a not for profit private institution founded in Moscow in 2009. This presentation of the V-A-C collection is part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s ongoing programme opening up important public and private collections for everyone.