Rachel Whiteread solidifies space. Employing materials that include concrete, plaster, resin and rubber to mould not the object itself but the area within or around it, she has single-handedly expanded the parameters of contemporary sculpture.
Whiteread first gained wide recognition in 1990 with Ghost, a plaster cast of the interior of an ordinary room. Ghost established Whiteread as an artist who would push boundaries and produce work that was both challenging and evocative. She has continued to develop her range with works that have included casts of the outer spaces of mattresses and mortuary slabs, the inner spaces of hot-water bottles, the undersides of tables and chairs, the spaces beneath floorboards and impressions of books on shelves, sometimes in quiet monochrome, sometimes in vivid jewel-like colour.
Whiteread won the Turner Prize in 1993, the same year as her first large-scale public project, House, a concrete cast of a nineteenth-century terraced house in the east end of London. She has since completed further site-specific projects: Holocaust Memorial in the Judenplatz, Vienna, Water Tower in New York and Monument, installed on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
This book is the first significant survey to examine Whiteread's career to date and includes new commentary on key works by the artist.