Tim Marlow TV - Tate online - David Cohen - The Independent - South Bank Show TV - Imagine … Rachel Whiteread: Ghosts in the Room TV - Sensationalists: The Bade Girls and Boys of British Art TV -
You have to absolutely acknowledge the work of Rachel Whiteread, whose now destroyed concrete casts of an entire house in East London in 1993 remains a haunting memory. Tim Marlow on ... British Sculpture 2011
English sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker. She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic (1982–5) and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (1985–7). Employing traditional casting methods and materials that are commonly used in the preparation of sculptures rather than for the finished object, such as plaster, rubber and resin, she makes sculptures of the spaces in, under and on everyday objects. Her art operates on many levels: it captures and gives materiality to the sometimes unfamiliar spaces of familiar life (bath, sink, mattress or chair), transforming the domestic into the public; it fossilises everyday objects in the absence of human usage; and it allows those objects to stand anthropomorphically for human beings themselves.
Whiteread’s choice of subject-matter reflects an awareness of the intrinsically human-scaled design of the objects with which we surround ourselves and exploits the severing of this connection, by removal of the object's function, to express absence and loss. Her early work allowed autobiographical elements. Later works move towards the expression of a universal human position, and their titles become correspondingly more prosaic. Tate online
Unquestionably the most resolved, substantial and satisfying use so far of the single idea that defines her career. David Cohen, re Sensation exhibition of 1997 and Ghost 1990
A strange and fantastical object which also amounts to one of the most extraordinary and imaginative sculptures created by an English artist this century. The Independent, re ‘House’ 1993
In 2001 the British sculpture Rachel Whiteread, then aged 38, made her name across the world with the body of work that portrayed the influence of American minimalism and British post-war sculpture. Rachel Whiteread, South Bank Show ***** ITV 2001
In 1990 Rachel Whiteread made a huge new sculpture – Ghost – which was the caste in plaster of the inside of a whole north London bedsit. ibid.
House: ‘I think it had something to do with the political climate of the time.’ ibid.
‘It was demolished on the orders of a London council.’ ibid. BBC News January 1994
Holocaust Memorial Sculpture: ‘This is a warning to future generations … This monument isn’t beautiful, nor should it be – It has to hurt.’ ibid. Simon Wiesenthal, opening ceremony
‘The sculptor of a house that won this year’s Turner Art Prize has watched her work being demolished.’ Imagine … Rachel Whiteread: Ghosts in the Room, BBC news, BBC 2017
The first woman to win the Turner Prize. This perceptive understated artist is celebrated across the world. ibid.
Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 1995 … Photographic Studies 1988 … Closet 1988 … Shallow Breath 1988 … Ghost 1990 … House 1993 … Water Tower 1998 … Untitled (Stairs) 2001 … Line Up 2007-8 … ibid.
Rachel Whiteread was born in Essex in 1963, the youngest of three girls. ibid.
It had been five years in the making but Rachel Whiteread’s holocaust memorial had finally won over its detractors. ibid.
The world of art, music and fashion swaggers with attitude. A time of dramatic change and the world is watching. Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art II: Is It Art?
Collector Charles Saatchi reaches for his checkbook. But to do something on this scale [pickled shark] comes with a £50,000 price tag … Saatchi also shows Hirst’s Thousand Years and Rachael Whiteread’s Ghost. ibid.
The reaction to House thrusts Rachel Whiteread into the limelight. She’s nominated for the Turner Prize. ibid.