British artist Rachel Whiteread is known for her distinctive sculptural works, making casts, often in resin, of forms as small as light switches and as large as entire buildings. She creates works from the negative space of the interior and exterior of objects, and a dramatic example of this approach is House (1993), which cast the interior of a terraced house in concrete. Although the work, installed in London’s East End, stood for only three months before being demolished, it won critical acclaim and a Turner Prize. Whiteread has since established herself as one of the country’s leading artists, and this exhibition is her most comprehensive to date, spanning her entire career, from sculptures displayed in her first solo show in 1988, to new works produced especially for Tate Britain.
Another highlight of the exhibition is Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 1995 – an installation of 100 resin casts of the underside of chairs – shown in Tate Britain’s Duveen galleries. Special sections are also devoted to archive material and to the artist’s drawings. Working with pencil, varnish, correction fluid, watercolour and collage, these works on paper constitute a distinct area of Whiteread’s practice and are an intimate part of her artistic process in producing her sculptural work.
Born in London in 1963, Whiteread studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. She was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993 and went on to represent Britain at the 1997 Venice Biennale. The exhibition will include documentation of House and all of the other public projects which have punctuated Whiteread’s career, such as Watertower 1998 in New York, the Holocaust Memorial 2000 in Vienna; Monument 2001 for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth in London and Cabin 2016 on Governor’s Island. She has been awarded numerous prestigious commissions, and solo exhibitions of her work have been shown internationally in museums and galleries such as MADRE in Naples, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Museums of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Serpentine Gallery in London. Whiteread lives and works in London and her work is represented in major private and public collections worldwide.
Rachel Whiteread, Tate Britain, London, 12 September – 21 January.
