Over the last 20 years, Rachel Whiteread has created a unique body of work by casting spare, poetic sculptures from discarded domestic objects and vacant architectural spaces. In the late 1980s, Whiteread began making casts from household items—beds, sinks, bathtubs, and wardrobes—to emphasize the private aspects of home life and to reflect 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, to capture their negative impressions. Each familiar yet strange form functions like a death mask, often evoking feelings of absence and loss and conjuring personal memories and associations. Formally, Whiteread’s work emphasizes materials and geometric forms in a manner similar to that of both Russian Constructivism [more] and Minimalist sculpture.
Over time, Whiteread has expanded the scope of her projects to include casts of several larger architectonic spaces, including the interior of a Victorian-era working class home, House (1993). Like many of her smaller furniture pieces, House retains traces of the form from which it was derived while simultaneously indicating their absence. Interior becomes exterior, ethereal space is transformed into an impermeable form, and the logic of architecture is inverted.
In 2001, Whiteread cast two sculptures from a London building that had been destroyed in 1941 and entirely reconstructed by 1957. Developed out of exigency, the building has assumed several identities, existing first as a synagogue, then a textile merchant’s warehouse, and eventually Whiteread’s home and studio. A casting of an upstairs apartment, Untitled (Apartment) comprises a series of small, nondescript rooms, suggestive of the low-income, standardized housing that proliferated after the Second World War as Europe struggled to rebuild itself. For its companion—Untitled (Basement)—Whiteread cast a basement staircase, which she reoriented by placing it on its side to create an uncanny sense of motion. The staid, blocky forms of both works emphasize the simple geometry of the structures from which they were created and allow viewers to contemplate the rebuilding of postwar Europe in an architectural style devoid of sentiment or flourish. Untitled (Apartment) and Untitled (Basement) reveal transient spaces where the realms of public and private, as well as religious, industrial, and domestic, lose distinction.
|
