RACHEL WHITEREAD

Born in London on 20 April 1963, Rachel Whiteread began her training in art by studying painting at the Brighton Polytechnic (1982-85) and sculpture at the Slade School of Art in London (1985-87), where she learnt the traditional methods of making casts and using materials useful in producing sculptures with which she made casts of her own body, revealing a sensitive reflection on the work of Bruce Nauman. At her first solo exhibition, presented at the Carlisle Gallery in London in 1988, she presented casts of furniture and domestic implements with autobiographical associations. Solidifying the space occupied by these everyday objects, Whiteread inverted the relationship between void and solid, so transforming negative into positive. The cast becomes an abstract and multipliable sculpture and is filled with materials — like plaster, rubber, concrete and, since 1994, resin polyesters — capable of preserving the memories, imprints and physical traces of human existence associated with these objects. After her first group exhibitions [1987, Whitworth Young Contemporaries, Manchester; 1988, Riverside Open, London; 1989, Whitechapel Open, London], in 1990 she attracted the attention of critics with her work Ghost [1990, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.], consisting of a cast in negative of the sitting room with fireplace of a traditional London home. Purchased by the collector Charles Saatchi, the promoter of Young British Art, the work marked a breakthrough in Whiteread’s work, whose interest was now centred not on the space around objects but domestic architecture in itself, where private life, family drama and collective history are intimately interwoven. The idea of making a cast of an inhabitable space was fully realized in 1993 with House, the "environmental imprint" of a Victorian house in the East End of London listed for demolition. It was commissioned by the Artangel Association and created in situ by filling the interior of the house with concrete before the walls were removed. This sculpture — in its turn demolished by the council — sought to retain the memory of a way of life which existed in the neighbourhood, at the same time affirming the public and monumental role of sculpture. The work, which won her the prestigious Turner Prize presented by the Tate Gallery, London (1993), is the consummate expression of the artist’s personal poetic, centred on the material visualization of something that existed but no longer does and tending to give visible form to absence and memory, nostalgia and the passing of time.
Compared with the formal provocations of many Young British Artists, of whom Whiteread is now an outstanding representative, her work is minimalist and operative, reflecting her interest in artists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse and Gordon Matta-Clark. This was confirmed by her participation in the exhibition Sense and Sensibility: Women and Minimalism in the Nineties at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994), and the installation Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), 1995] exhibited in 1997 at the group show Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, made up of casts in synthetic resin, translucent and coloured, of the space beneath one hundred chairs of different forms. A work based on an ambiguous relationship between positive and negative space, which is intrinsic to the process of making models from casts (in which the negative become positive and vice versa) and which, since 1992, has had led Whiteread to interest herself in engraving [Mausoleum under Construction, 1992, silk-screen printing, Tate Collection, London; Demolished, 1996, portfolio, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and Tate Collection, London]. In 1997 she was commissioned to represent Britain at the 47th Venice Biennale, where she received the award for best young artist for her work Untitled (Paperbacks), an environmental installation consisting of the outlines in negative of a bookcase. In the years that followed the number of public commissions multiplied.
On the invitation of the Public Art Fund of New York City, in 1998 she produced Water Tower, based on the reconstruction in translucent resin of an existing water tank installed on the roofs of the Soho district. In 2000, after five years of controversy, the Holocaust Memorial in the Vienna Judenplatz was unveiled, a public library but inaccessible, consisting of casts of books with the backs turned inwards: symbols of knowledge and a cultural identity negated by Nazism. Then followed in 2001 Untitled Monument, commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) as part of The Fourth Plinth public art project for the empty pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square. The monument, consisting of the double, upside-down mirror image of the base itself, plays on the juxtaposition of void and solid, of dark stone and transparent resin. In the same year the also had an anthological exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2001) and a solo exhibition commissioned by the Guggenheim in Berlin, Bilbao and New York. Titled Transient Spaces (2001-2002), it presented two new sculptures of large dimensions, Untitled (Basement) and Untitled (Apartment) (2001), which further develop her reflections on architecture as a place of personal memory and social history. Commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, the two works are based on the rooms in her new studio home, a building which had many functions in the past, first as a synagogue then as the warehouse of a textile shop, reflecting the aesthetics and necessities which informed European building in the postwar period.
In 2004, in view of the pending demolition of Broadcasting House, the BBC commissioned her to make a cast of Room 101, once used as the office of the English writer George Orwell (1903-1950), as well as the imaginary torture room in the Ministry of the Love in his last and most famous novel, 1984 (written in 1948 and published in 1949). If here Whiteread again turns the space into an object, the work she produced in collaboration with the architect Juhani Pallasmaa for The Snow Show 2004 in Lapland, Finland, constituted a reversal of her approach. In this case the three-dimensional models of real stair shafts in East London are assembled to constitute a passable and bizarre architecture, as "impossible" as Penrose Stairs.
Working with the negative of spaces and objects, the artist gives a perceptible form to the invisible side of reality. This appears in Untitled (Nets) [2002, Edition Schellmann, Munchen-New York], in which she inverted the usual process of making prints, serializing the plates rather than the engravings, for which she won the 2006 Biella Prize for Engraving. Simultaneously, following her find of an old box of personal effects, her interest turned to this banal object, produced in series on a large scale and widely used, which now becomes the form of an endless variety of compositions where a certain degree of formal determination is combined with randomness. The result was the impressive installation created in 2005 for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, Embankment, consisting of 14,000 plaster casts reproducing the inner volumes of cardboard boxes of different shapes and sizes, bring out their commonly hidden surfaces. The more recent works, consisting of compositions of casts of boxes resting on the floor or arranged on brackets and distinguished by muted colours, led the critic Paul Coldwell to compare Whiteread’s work to the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi. He invited the artist to exhibit in the exhibition Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art, commissioned in 2006 by the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London. At present Whiteread is one of five artists invited by Eurostar, London and Continental Railways, Land Securities to present a project for a colossal sculpture to be erected for the 2012 Olympic Games on a hill near Ebbsfleet railway station in Kent as a rival attraction to the Angel of the North realized in 1998 by Antony Gormley at Gateshead.
Today she lives and works in London.