Rachel Whiteread

One of the most significant contemporary sculptors, Rachel Whiteread’s works range from the intimate to the monumental, using industrial materials – plaster, concrete, resin, rubber – to cast everyday objects and spaces. She records the negative space within or around structures to generate sculptures that are at once mimetic and abstract. Her focus is often domestic, concerned with documenting “the residue of years and years of use”. 

Born in London in 1963, Whiteread studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. She rose to prominence as part of the YBAs, alongside artists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. In 1993, Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner Prize. The same year she made House, a life-sized cast of the interior of an east London Victorian terrace house, which was controversially demolished only a few months later. In 1997 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Her public commissions include the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, Austria, which was completed in 2000. Whiteread was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2019 for services to Art. Whiteread has exhibited internationally, with major retrospectives at the Tate Britain, London and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Her works are held in numerous contemporary art collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.