Rachel Whiteread
Born – London, England
Rachel Whiteread studied at Brighton Polytechnic from 1932-1985 and then at the Slade School of Art in London until 1987. Untitled (House) is a concrete cast of the complete interior of a terraced dwelling, doomed to demolition. It is a ghostly, yet tangible manifestation of the air that was once breath and the silence that was the stuff of its rooms. The sculpture, in Bow, London, was itself demolished in 1993. The memory of Whiteread’s achievements lives on as an immovable monument in art history. The artist cast the interior spaces that were once occupied by human domestic activity or emotional emptiness. These negative areas – the hiding place under the bed, the secret, musty atmosphere inside a wardrobe, the seductive, vacant bath – are transformed into positive, inert lumps of past lives. Whiteread sculpts the intangible; she reveals the gaps in which memories are hidden as solid testimonies to life’s events. Rubber cats of mattresses proliferate in Whiteread’s earlier work, as do plaster casts of her own body. More recently she has received several major public commissions, creating the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, Austria, completed in 2000, and Monument, a controversial clear resin plinth installed in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2004.
Masterpieces:
- Ghost
- Untitled (Stairs)
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Books About rachel whiteread
Tate Modern Artists: Rachel Whiteread
Charlotte Mullins
Buy on Amazon
Rachel Whiteread: Drawings
Allegra Pesenti
Buy on Amazon
The Art of Rachel Whiteread
Buy on Amazon