Drawing on Shakespeare's plays and poetry, Banker's new paintings reflect on the thousand-year-long discussion about word and image. Her work illuminates how poetry and painting, by opening up fields for shifting signification, share the capacity for representation and abstraction.

Bringing together the visual and the verbal, Banker's canvases are not about the constitution of meaning, but about the construction of webs of reminiscences-they only imply, and never directly signify, the literary allusions of their titles. Cleopatra In Banker's new work, as opposed to the heavily marked surfaces of earlier paintings, one finds an unexpected tranquility of gesture. Still inscribed by traces of their making, as well as by the erasure of marks, these canvases also propose a model the process of painting as a double of writing, combining painting and poetry as spatio-temporal media.

Richard II and Anne of Bohemia Through their layered surfaces, the paintings embody time as do poetry and words: as if in a palimpsest, through superimposed structures of marks, they figure and materialize the temporal dimension of painting. Due to their woven strata, Banker's paintings solicit viewers to see and contemplate them up close. Inviting us to experience their tactility, Banker reminds us that, in painting, chroma never exits without solidity, that color is always substance.