A new plaster cast by Rachel Whiteread of Room 101 at BBC Broadcasting House will be displayed in the Cast Courts of the V&A from Friday 14th November. The sculpture, Untitled (Room 101), commemorates the office whose number Orwell adopted for the torture chamber in his distopian novel 1984. Orwell worked for the BBC for two years during the Second World War, as a talks producer in the Indian Section of the Eastern Service. The sculpture was made in Orwell's centenary year before the room was demolished as part of the redevelopment of Broadcasting House.
Untitled (Room 101) joins a portfolio of permanent and temporary art by established and emerging artists from Britain and abroad that have been created for display in BBC and public buildings across the country. It continues the Corporation's long tradition as a patron of public art.
The Cast Courts are one of the most dramatic spaces at the V&A and contain plaster reproductions of celebrated European architecture and sculpture, including a life-size replica of Trajan's column, Michelangelo's David and Ghiberti's bronze doors for the Baptistry in Florence. The V&A's collection is unmatched in its range and size and is one of the few groups of plaster casts to survive.
Modus Operandi art consultancy is leading the Public Art Programme for Broadcasting House.
Rachel Whiteread was born in the United Kingdom in 1963. Using materials that can include plaster, concrete, resin, and rubber she updates the conventions of casting, by moulding not the object itself but the area within or around it. Chairs, tables, beds, bathtubs, bookshelves, floors * ordinary things that stand as evidence in the everyday histories of life * have all been subjected to this process of spatial transformation. In 1993, she was thrust into the public eye when she cast the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house. Her largest work to date, a sculpture of the interior of a library, commissioned as a memorial to victims of the Holocaust, was unveiled in Vienna's Judenplatz in October 2000. She lives and works in London.
IMAGE
Rachel Whiteread
Mixed media
Commissioned by Modus Operandi Art
Consultants for the BBC Broadcasting House
Public Art Programme
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London
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