j.frede

4th December 2010

Text with 1 note

reading: Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread - Untitled (Basement)

Rachel Whiteread, (born 20 April 1963) is a British artist, best known for her sculptures, which typically take the form of casts, and first woman to win the Turner Prize.

Whiteread is one of the Young British Artists, and exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997. She is probably best known for Ghost, a large plaster cast of the inside of a room in a Victorian house, and for her resinsculpture for the empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.

Many of Whiteread’s works are casts of ordinary domestic objects and, in numerous cases, the space the objects do not inhabit (often termed the “negative space”) — instead producing a solid cast of where the space within a container would be; particular parts of rooms, the area underneath furniture, for example. She says the casts carry “the residue of years and years of use”. Whiteread mainly focuses on the line and the form for her pieces.

Unlike many other Young British Artists who often seem to welcome controversy, Whiteread has often said how uncomfortable she feels about it. On 24 May 2004, a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including, it is believed, some by Whiteread.

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Stacks), 1999, plaster, polystyrene and steel. (Image: Anthony d’Offay Gallery)

Rachel Whiteread - Ghost

In 1990 she expanded on her earlier work with Ghost, the first of her works to cast an entire living space and the first to bring her to the attention of the public and critics. Like her earlier works, it shows signs of a place having been lived in, with patches of wallpaper and specks of colour from paint discernible on the walls. It is a cast of an entire room, and this motif was expanded in 1993 with House. It was purchased by the collector Charles Saatchi.