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Indepth Arts News:
"Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces"
2001-10-27 until 2002-01-13
Guggenheim Museum, Berlin
Berlin, ,
DE
British artist Rachel Whiteread has created a unique body of sculpture in
which ordinary domestic objects and architectural spaces are
transformed into poetic, thought-provoking works of art. In the late
1980s, Whiteread began making casts from household items including
beds, sinks, bathtubs, and wardrobes, emphasizing the private aspects
of domestic life and reflecting the human body in symbolic terms.
Using
industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, rubber, and polystyrene,
Whiteread typically cast the space underneath, around, or inside these
objects, creating negative impressions of the items she worked with.
These familiar yet strange forms, which record the shape and surface of
the original objects in detail, function like a death mask, often evoking
feelings of absence and loss and conjuring up various personal
memories and associations for the viewer.
Over time, Whiteread has expanded the scope of her output to include
casts of larger architectonic spaces. In 1993, the artist created House, a
concrete cast of the entire interior space of a Victorian-era working-class
home located on an East London street. After the walls of the house were
removed, a pale gray structure was revealed, standing like a ghost of its
original form. Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial, another monumental
piece, was unveiled in October 2000 in Vienna's Judenplatz. Devoted to
the Austrian Jews killed during World War II, this monolithic structure-an
impenetrable, inside-out library-alludes to Nazi book burnings and also
makes symbolic reference to the people of the book, remarking not
only on the Holocaust but the larger history of the Jewish people.
For Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Whiteread has created two new
sculptures cast from a London building she recently acquired. Devoid of
architectural flourish, Untitled (Apartment) is comprised of a series of
small, nondescript rooms, suggestive of the low-income, standardized
housing that proliferated after the Second World War as Europe rushed
to rebuild itself. For its companion, Untitled (Basement), Whiteread cast
a staircase, which she reoriented by setting it on its side in order to
create an uncanny sense of motion. Embodying the generic nature of
much postwar architecture, the staid blocky form of both works
emphasizes the simple geometry of the structures they were cast from,
and also recalls the scale of 1960s Minimalist sculpture. Throughout its
history, the London building from which these works derive has had a
fluid identity, readily changing functions over time as required by its
occupants, existing first as a synagogue, then a textile merchant's
warehouse, and soon it will again be transformed, this time as
Whiteread's new home and studio. Echoing the transient spirit of
postwar culture, Untitled (Basement) and Untitled (Apartment) blur the
distinctions between private and public, past and present, as well as
religious and secular, recalling the aesthetic and economic concerns of
that time.
In the early 1990s Whiteread began to receive international attention
as part of a stylistically diverse group of artists known as the Young
British Artists (YBA). Among her contemporaries, Whiteread has
distinguished herself for creating an innovative body of work that
reflects a quiet, contemplative spirit, receiving such accolades as the
Tate Gallery's prestigious Turner Prize (1993) and an award at the
47th Venice Biennale (1997). Most recently, in the summer of 2001,
Whiteread's work was the subject of a retrospective at the Serpentine
Gallery, London, and a new public sculpture, Monument, was unveiled
in Trafalgar Square.
IMAGE:
Rachel Whiteread
Untitled (Basement)
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Berlin 2001
Photo: Mike Bruce
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