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Rachel Whiteread CBE (born 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. She is one of the so-called Young British Artists, and exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997. She is probably best known for House, a large concrete cast of the inside of a Victorian house, and for her resin sculpture for the empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square.
Family life
Whiteread was born in London and raised in the Essex countryside, until aged seven, when the family returned to London. She is the third of three sisters — the older two being identical twins; they spoke a secret language and Whiteread's personality was influenced by having to "fight her corner" in a two-against-one situation. **. One of the twins, Karen Whiteread , is also an artist.
Rachel Whiteread's mother, Pat Whiteread, was also an artist. She died in 2003 aged 72, the death having a profound impact on Rachel's work. Her father was a geography teacher, polytechnic administrator and lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, who died when Whiteread was studying at art school in 1989. Rachel trained in painting in Brighton Polytechnic, was briefly at the Cyprus College of Art, and later studied sculpture at London's Slade School of Art under Antony Gormley. For a time she worked in Highgate Cemetery fixing lids back onto time-damaged coffins. She began to exhibit in 1987, with her first solo exhibition coming in 1988. She lives and works in a former synagogue in East London with long-term partner and fellow sculptor Marcus Taylor. They have a son, Connor, aged four as of October 2005.
Works
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".
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.
Embankment- current exhibition (2005-2006)
In spring 2004, she was offered the annual Unilever Series commission to produce a piece for Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall, delaying acceptance for five to six months until she was confident she could conceive of a work to fill the space Throughout the latter half of September 2005 and mid-way into October her work Embankment was installed and was made public on October 10. It consists of some 14,000 transluscent, white polyethylene boxes (themselves casts of the inside of cardboard boxes) stacked in various ways; some in very tall mountain-like peaks and others in lower (though still over human height), rectangular, more levelled arrangements. They are fixed in position with adhesive. She cited the end scenes of both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Citizen Kane as visual precursors, she also spoke of the death of her mother and a period of upheaval which involved packing and moving comparable boxes †. It is also thought that her recent trip to the Arctic is an inspiration, although critics counter that white is merely the colour the polyethylene comes in, and it would have added significantly to the expense to dye them. The boxes were manufactured from casts of ten distinct cardboard boxes by a company that produces grit bins and traffic bollards [http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1593080,00.html. The work will remain on view until April 2006.
Critical response
"With this work Whiteread has deepened her game, and made a work as rich and subtle as it is spectacular. Whatever else it is, Embankment is generous and brave, a statement of intent." *
"Everything feels surprisingly domestic in scale, the intimidating vistas of the Turbine Hall shrunk down to irregular paths and byways. From atop the walkway, it looks like a storage depot that is steadily losing the plot; from inside, as you thread your way between the mounds of blocks, it feels more like an icy maze." *
- — Andrew Dickson, The Guardian, October 10 2005.
"This is another example of meritless gigantism that could be anywhere, and is the least successful of the gallery's six attempts to exploit its most unsympathetic space,"*
"like a random pile of giant sugar cubes *.
- — Stephen Moyes, The Mirror, October 11 2005.
| External link: photo of Embankment at artnet Magazine. |
Untitled Monument (2001)
With Untitled Monument (2001), (also variously known as Plinth or Inverted Plinth), Whiteread became the third artist to provide a sculpture for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Her sculpture was an 11 ton resin cast of the plinth itself, which stood upsidedown, making a sort of mirror-image of the plinth. It was said to be the largest object ever made out of resin, taking eight attempts to produce due to the resin cracking *. The work was produced in two halves and surface blisters of the cast repaired by picking them off and filling the small craters with a syringe of resin. Unusually for a public work, she raised the funds for the piece herself by selling maquettes (small prepatory models); this was no small gesture with the mold alone costing over £100,000.Critical response
"This dazzling anti-monument monument looks like a glass coffin, but its watery transparency relates to the large fountain that dominates the Trafalgar plaza. Following the aquatic theme, Whiteread's Monument evokes the scene of the1805 naval battle for which the square is named." *
- — David Ebony, Artnet
"It's a simple trick, but an effective one, and the associations it conjures — heaviness and lightness, earth and heaven, death and life — are thought-provoking and manifold * Whiteread's Monument, as light and gleaming as the plinth is dark and squat, is the only one of the four commissioned pieces to allude directly to the plinth's defining emptiness. She sees it not as a space to be filled, but as an absence to be acknowledged, and she does it well."
- — Ned Denny, New Statesman, July 9 2001.
| External links: Unveiling at The Guardian — Commentary at The Guardian — BBC image — artbabyart image — Book cover at Amazon showing the work. |
Holocaust Monument aka Nameless Library (2000)
Whiteread's casts often seem to emphasise the fact that the objects they represent are not themselves there, and critics have often regarded her work to be redolent of death and absence. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that she was asked by Austrian authorities to create a work in remembrance of Austrian Jews killed during the Holocaust. Due to political sensitivites and bureaucracy the process, from commission to unveling, took five years *.The work turned out to be Holocaust Monument (2000; also known as Nameless Library) and is located at one end of the Judenplatz in Vienna. It is a room-sized cast in dental plaster, with the walls made up of rows of books, with the pages, rather than the spines, turned outward; this can be regarded as a comment on Jews as a "people of the book" and the Nazi book burnings *. On one of the walls is a set of double-doors, also in dental plaster.
| External links: Guardian review — Image at KurtMilam.com. |
Water Tower (1998)
In 1998, Whiteread made Water Tower as part of a grant for New York City's Public Art Fund. The piece was a translucent resin cast of a water tower installed on a rooftop in New York City's SoHo district. Just as Ghost led on to the larger and better known House, so Water Tower led to the more public Trafalgar Square plinth work three years later.Technical: 9,000 lb of translucent resin, painted steel, 12 ft 2 in (370.8 cm) high x 9' (274.3 cm) in diameter.
Critical response
"an extremely beautiful object, which changes colour with the sky, and also a very appropriate one, celebrating one of the most idiosyncratic and charming features of the New York skyline." *
| External links: Image and details — Image at MoMA — Image at Artnet'' — Gallery and commentary at Archidose |
Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (1997)
For the Sensation exhibition in 1997, Whiteread exhibited Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), a series of resin casts of the space underneath chairs. This work can be seen as a descendant of Bruce Nauman's concrete cast of the area under his chair of 1965.Critical response
"like a field of large glace sweets, it is her most spectacular, and benign installation to date Monuments to domesticity, they are like solidified jellies, opalescent ice-cubes, or bars of soap — lavender, rose, spearmint, lilac. They look like a regulated graveyard or a series of futuristic standing stones with a passing resemblance to television sets." [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_199610/ai_n8754228
- — Andrew Lambirth, The Spectator, October 12 1996.
"Particularly effective when bathed in natural light, it creates beauty from domestic nothingness." *
- — Nick Hackworth, London Evening Standard, November 12 2002.
| External links: Extensive commentary at Columbia University — Image at artnet'' No. 1 — No.2. |
House (1993)
House, perhaps her best known work, was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in autumn 1993, exhibited at the location of the original house — 193 Grove Road — in East London (all the houses in the street had earlier been knocked down by the council). It drew mixed responses, winning her both the Turner Prize for best young British artist in 1993 and the K Foundation art award for worst British artist. In January 1994, the local council (Tower Hamlets) decided to demolish House, a decision which caused some controversy itself.Critical response
"A strange and fantastical object which also amounts to one of the most extraordinary and imaginative sculptures created by an English artist this century.
"Denatured by transformation, things turn strange here. Fireplaces bulge outwards from the walls of House, doorknobs are rounded hollows. Architrave’s have become chiselled incisions running around the monument, forms as mysterious as the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs."
Ghost (1990)
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 discernable 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 dominant collector Charles Saatchi.Critical response
"unquestionably the most resolved, substantial and satisfying use so far of the single idea that defines her career."*
- — David Cohen, Artnet — reviewing the Sensation exhibition in 1997.
| ''External links: Commentary from The Washington Post — Commentary from Art Journal — Image from The National Gallery of Art (rear of work) |
See also
References
† The Culture Show, BBC2, 13 October 2005.
External links
Resources
- Tate Collection — Rachel Whiteread
- Rachel Whiteread Embankment at Tate Modern, London, UK
- Whiteread at Sculpture.org.uk
- More works from artnet
- Rachel Whiteread — Transient Spaces at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
- Archived material about an exhibition.
Media
- Flickr photos tagged Rachel Whiteread
- As of October 15 2005 link currently reveals photos of the installation of Embankment and a few pictures of earlier works.
- Flickr photos tagged Judenplatz
- As of October 17 2005 link currently reveals photos of the monument.
- The Unilever Series of commissions at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall — The Guardian.
- Small online gallery of all six commissions to have filled the Turbine Hall thus far, including Whiteread's Embankment.
- POL Oxygen gallery of her work
Articles
- Some day my plinth will come — The Guardian, 27 May, 2001.
- Profile and interview through the time that Untitled (Monument) was being cast.
- Arts:Rachel Whiteread — The Independent, May 26, 2001.
- Another profile and interview through the time that Untitled (Monument) was being cast.
- Still breaking the mold — The Guardian, October 11 2005.
- Profile and interview at the time of Embankment's unveling.
- Boxing clever — The Guardian, October 16 2005.
- Profile and interview just prior to Embankment's unveling.
1963 births | Living people | British sculptors | Contemporary sculptors | Women in art | UCL alumni | Turner Prize winners | Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
"Rachel Whiteread"