Curator Anna Namit and KIT Finance Private Bank are pleased to present artist Vanessa Beecroft's unique photograph "VB47.377.dr" at the Art Banking Club. Vanessa is famed for her projects incorporating hundreds of naked women. The photograph forms part of the KIT Finance Private Bank collection of contemporary art.

Video fragments of Vanessa Beecroft's most famous performances will be shown at this exhibition at the Art Banking Club. "Descriptions of Beecroft's performances are most often rendered in epithets: "art", "fashion", "genius", "awful", "provocative", "disquieting". In her work the artist creates a multi-figured composition from female bodies (naked, as a rule), in which a deep and provocative message is hidden behind esthetically beautiful images", says curator of the project, Anna Namit, founder and head of the Art Banking Club.

The Art Banking Club exhibition will centre around Vanessa Beecroft's photograph "VB47.377.dr", taken during a performance on the grounds of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. "VB47.377.dr" is Vanessa's sixth picture from a series of six prints procured for KIT Finance's collection at a leading auction of contemporary art several years ago. The photograph captures the expressionistic scene full of hidden tension by way of 20 depersonalised models. The portrait invokes the decapitated sculptures and pictures of Giorgio de Chiriko, and the work 'The Return of Ulysses' (de Chiriko, 1968).

Vanessa Beecroft began exhibiting "living pictures"or "living sculpture" of naked, semi-naked or clothed models of either sex, though more often women, and of various ages, though largely young people,in the best museums and galleries around the world about ten years ago. These shows are very simply referred to by the initials of the artist VB (Vanessa Beecroft) plus a serial number.

Beecroft's conceptual approach is not intrinsically either performance or documentary, but something between the two, closer to Renaissance painting. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live performances to create their own ephemeral composition. In her early works the event is an existential encounter between the models and the audience, their shame and their expectation. Each performance is made for a specific location and allusions are often made to the political, historical, or social associations of the place where it is held. The works are deceptively simple in their execution, provoking questions around identity, politics and voyeurism in the complex relationship between the audience, model and context. In her later works, Beecroft exhibits a theatrical approach in which she uses clothes more often than nudity, and even depicts food. In some there are men in military uniform. During her performances, video recordings are made and photographs taken to be exhibited as separate works of art, not just documentation of the performances.

Vanessa Beecroft, Italian born, but now living in New York,has earnt herself an international reputation as a most progressive young artist. Her works have been displayed in major museums and exhibitions around the world: at the Venice Biennale in 1997; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1998;at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and in San Diego, and at the Centre of Art Spiral Wacoal in Tokyo in 1999; at the Whitney Biennial in the Museum of American Art in New York in 2000, and at the Kunsthalle Wien in 2001.