Рэйчел Уайтред: скульптуры памяти и пространства

English artist

Dame Rachel Whiteread (born 20 April 1963) is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993.

Whiteread was born in 1963 in Ilford, Essex. Her mother, Patricia Whiteread (née Lancaster), who was also an artist, died in 2003 at the age of 72. Her father, Thomas Whiteread, was a geography teacher, polytechnic administrator and lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, who died when Whiteread was studying at art school in 1988. She is the third of three sisters – the older two being identical twins. For a time she worked in Highgate Cemetery fixing lids back onto time damaged coffins. She began to exhibit in 1987, with her first solo exhibition coming in 1988. She lives and works in a former synagogue in east London with long term partner and fellow sculptor Marcus Taylor. They have two sons. She says the casts carry "the residue of years and years of use." Whiteread mainly focuses on the line and the form for her pieces. While still at the Slade, Whiteread cast domestic objects and created her first sculpture, Closet. She made a plaster cast of the interior of a wooden wardrobe and covered it with black felt. It was based on comforting childhood memories of hiding in a dark closet. She completed Ghost in 1990. It was cast from a room in a house on Archway Road in north London, much like the house she grew up in. The road was being widened, and the house was torn down. She used plaster to cast the parlor walls and ceiling in sections and assembled them on a metal frame. Ghost was first shown at the nonprofit Chisenhale Gallery. It was purchased by Charles Saatchi and included with other works by Whiteread in his first "Young British Art" show in 1992. In May 2004 a fire in a Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including, it is believed, some by Whiteread. However, Ghost had recently been moved from the warehouse to the new Gagosian Gallery in London. The work was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. in the autumn of 2004. According to the National Gallery, "She has worked on every scale, defining the space between positives and negatives, public and private, and manufactured and handmade objects, always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power."

In October 1993 Whiteread completed House, the cast of a Victorian terrace house. She had begun considering casting an entire house in 1991. She and James Lingwood of Artangel looked at houses to be torn down in North and East London in 1992, but without success in securing one. During this period in 1992 and 1993, Whiteread had an artist residency in Berlin with a scholarship from the DAAD Artist's Programme. While in Berlin, she created Untitled (Room), the cast of a generic, anonymous room that she built herself. She finished the interior of a room sized box with wallpaper, windows, and door before casting. House, perhaps her best known work, was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in autumn 1993, exhibited at the location of the original house – 193 Grove Road – in East London (all the houses in the street had earlier been knocked down by the council). It drew mixed responses, winning her both the Turner Prize for the best young British artist in 1993 and the K Foundation art award for the worst British artist. She was the first woman to win a Turner Prize. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council demolished House on 11 January 1994, a decision which caused some controversy itself.

In 1998, Whiteread made Water Tower as part of a grant for New York City's Public Art Fund. The piece, which is 12' 2" and 9' in diameter, was a translucent resin cast of a water tower installed on a rooftop in New York City's SoHo district. It has been called "an extremely beautiful object, which changes colour with the sky, and also a very appropriate one, celebrating one of the most idiosyncratic and charming features of the New York skyline." Just as Ghost led on to the larger and better known House, so Water Tower led to the more public Trafalgar Square plinth work three years later.

During the Holocaust, 65,000 Austrian Jews were executed, and in memory, Monument to the Victims of Fascism was a monument erected to commemorate these lost lives, however, this piece was seen as unsatisfying, so Simon Wiesenthal proposed the idea for a new memorial to the mayor of Vienna. With the condition that this memorial could not be figurative and needed to represent all 65,000 lives and the camps they were executed at, Rachel Whiteread was chosen out of ten artists to create this monument. Her monument Nameless Library was erected in Judenplatz Square in Vienna and appears to be an inside out library. This structure was built from positively cast cement books which are placed with their spines facing inward. The inability to read these books allude to the lost lives of the 65,000 Austrian Jews whose stories are unable to be told leaving the viewer with a sense of loss and absence. These books have also been seen as referring to the Nazi book burnings. The sculpture also does not include corners or bookshelves which further symbolizes the lack of structure and support. Nameless Library also is constructed on the excavation grounds of Vienna's oldest synagogues which caused a lot of criticism towards the piece as many citizens felt that the grounds sufficed for the memorial itself. Some critics even accused her of stereotyping the Jewish people as "the people of the book" considering that Jewish memorials were traditionally written. This monument also questions the architectural concepts of interior and exterior as the building surrounding the square form walls, and the streets leading into it like doorways. In addition, the inverted rose ceiling works as a drainage point to the interior of the sculpture.

Whiteread created this small, plaster sculpture for a charity auction by the Prior Weston PTA, in support of the Prior Weston primary school in Islington, London. The piece measures, a comparatively tiny, 16 cm x 11.5 cm x 11.5 cm.

She was one of the five artists shortlisted for the Angel of the South project in January 2008.

The Gran Boathouse is located on the waters edge in Gran Norway. From a distance, it looks like any other boathouse, but closer inspection reveals that this is a work of art in concrete. The work is a cast of the interior of an old boathouse. Whiteread turns the boathouse inside out thereby capturing a moment in time. In this way, she encourages us to reflect on what we see around us. "I have mummified the air inside the boathouse," says Rachel Whiteread. "I wanted to make a shy sculpture, a sculpture that would stand there peaceful and noble." The boathouse and its interior had all the qualities that she was looking for. It represented the history of the place. The sculpture is preserving what would otherwise have been lost.

The Hammer Museum exhibited Whiteread's first museum retrospective of works on paper in 2010. The exhibition traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Tate Britain.

In 2023, Whiteread created a 31 feet tall Christmas tree covered by 102 circular neon white hoops for Carlos Place outside The Connaught hotel in London's Mayfair district which commissioned the piece.