Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread is most widely known for House (1993) in London, where she cast the inside of an old Victorian style house that was going to be demolished.  The cast was made out of concrete that stood in the public for a few months before it was bulldozed to the ground.  Whiteread had been looking for a condemned domestic building that she could memorialize, since these were being demolished by the thousands, authorized by the government.  By casting the actual negative space inside the house in concrete, Whiteread memorialized not only the house itself, but memories, space and the structure the house once held.  In 1997, Whiteread was commissioned to make the Holocaust Memorial for Vienna, in which the sculpture resembles an inverted library.  It is a concrete cast of rows of books, spines turned to the inside, as well as two handle-less doors at one end of the building.  Viewers are not able to read the books nor enter the space.  Whiteread ultimately constructed the epitome of a heroic monument, embodying and commemorating loss.  She also works in a variety of materials, ranging from resin, plaster, concrete and rubber, to cast spaces within and around objects.  It has been said that Whiteread has done an incredible job of making the “invisible visible”.  Casting has become her language that she has been studying for over 15 years.  In her earlier career, she looked to sarcophagi and volcanoes as inspiration, as well as other objects and monuments that were completely elemental and unpredictable.  Interestingly, although Whiteread has worked very large for a long time, she is ready to begin working small and manageable once more. 

http://www.sculpture.org.uk/biography/RachelWhiteread/

Harper, Glenn, and Twylene Moyer. Conversations on Sculpture. Hamilton, N. J.: Isc, 2007.

Collins, Judith. Sculpture Today. London: Phaidon, 2007. Print.