Dame Rachel Whiteread (London, 1963) is a contemporary British artist.
She is well known, in addition to having represented the Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1997, also for being the first female artist to win the Turner Prize thanks to the work House (1993), a monumental cast of a Victorian house destined for demolition in East London, made by filling the interior with white cement and demolishing the exterior walls to reveal the internal volumes of rooms no longer inhabitable.
Her work appear as a continuous relationship between the private sphere, the domestic spaces and the public dimension. In fact, what is a crucial element in her work is the meaning of inhabiting, the sense of the interior spaces, the private dimension of the buildings and the importance of "the everyday".
"I wanted to preserve the everyday, I wanted to give authority to the most forgotten things."
These are doors and windows, the architectural elements that allow communication between the private sphere and the public dimension. Whiteread recreates their concave surfaces in coloured resin, giving them a transparency that reveals the transience of the boundary marked by these dividing elements.
Rachel Whiteread was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006. In celebration of the 2012 London Olympic Games, she was commissioned to fill a space that had stood vacant on the Whitechapel Gallery for more than a century.
Today, Whiteread’s works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
She lives and works in London, UK.
Rachel Whiteread, Stairs, 2003, Paper, gouache and graphite on paper, 670 × 510 mm,
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Stairs) 2001, Sculpture, Plaster, fibreglass and wood, object: 3750 x 2200 x 5800 mm, Copyright © Rachel Whiteread, Photo © Tate.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (rooms), 2001, installation, plaster, fibreglass, wood and metal.
Copyright © Rachel Whiteread. Photo ©Tate.
Rachel Whiteread, Two doors, 2016, Resin 2470 x 1240 x 80 m. Copyright © Rachel Whiteread.
Rachel Whiteread, Chicken Shed 2017 Concrete 2160 x 2290 x 2780 mm
Copyright © Rachel Whiteread, Photo © Tate.
Rachel Whiteread, Two Windows, 2007, Paper, gouache and graphite on paper, 380 × 280 mm
Copyright © Rachel Whiteread, Photo © Tate.
Rachel Whiteread, Stair Space III, 1995, Resin, ink and correction fluid on paper, 594 × 420 mm,
Copyright © Rachel Whiteread, Photo © Tate.
We do not own the rights to any of the pictures in the article. All the rights go to the authors of the pictures. (Copyright © Rachel Whiteread).
All the pictures taken from: Tate Modern. London, UK. - Photo © Tate.
All the Images: HERE
You can find more pictures on the Gagosian Website: HERE