About
Seeing a great piece of art can take you from one place to another—it can enhance daily life, reflect our times and, in that sense, change the way you think and are.
—Rachel Whiteread
In Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and drawings, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces are transformed into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through casting, she frees her subject matter—from beds, tables, and boxes to water towers and entire houses—from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory.
During her childhood in London, Whiteread’s parents’ interests in art and architecture made an enormous impact on her understanding of form and material. Her father’s fascination with urban architecture “enabled [her] to look up,” and her mother’s artistic practice allowed her to see the intersection of home and studio, life and art. Whiteread fondly remembers helping her father lay a concrete floor in their basement to convert it into a studio. The processes of looking, emptying, and filling run throughout her work, revealing how the surfaces of daily life can disappear and reappear, bearing the traces of their previous lives.
Whiteread studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1980s. In 1988 she had her first solo exhibition, at the Carlisle Gallery in London, which included the sculptures Shallow Breath (1988), cast from the underside of a divan, and Torso (1988), the first in a series of cast hot water bottles. The Torso sculptures (1988–) are notably the only works in her oeuvre that make direct anthropomorphic reference. This exhibition marked the beginning of Whiteread’s use of domestic items; in these early pieces, she often left remnants of the original objects—such as scraps of wood—embedded into the cast forms.
Ghost (1990) was Whiteread’s first large-scale sculpture and set in motion the ambitious, architecturally scaled works for which she is widely recognized today. Made by filling a room of a Victorian house in North London with concrete to create a solid cast that picks up the details of the walls, mantle, and windows, Ghost is a positive room-sized object that reveals itself gradually, as one encircles the huge form. Whiteread expanded on this working method in House (1993; destroyed 1994), cast from an entire Victorian terrace house. Whiteread created this work after all the other terraces in the row had been demolished, and it stood alone as a reminder of the working-class homes that once spanned the street. The sculpture sparked heated debates around issues of real estate, class divisions, and urban sprawl.
Whiteread’s first public commission in New York, Water Tower (1998), was cast from one of the city’s distinctive rooftop water towers in clear resin. “On a cloudy, gray day,” Whiteread explained, “it might just completely disappear. And on a really bright blue-sky day, it will ignite.” This ethereal presence contrasts with the weight of her Holocaust Memorial (2000), permanently installed in Vienna. Dedicated to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the sculpture resembles, in the words of James Lawrence, “a private library turned inside out,” each wall lined with rows of nameless books, with two permanently closed doors on the front. In 2018 Whiteread’s US Embassy (Flat pack house) (2013–15) was unveiled at the United States Embassy in London, where the cast sections of an average 1950s suburban American house, arranged as separate geometric planes on a wall, greet visitors as they enter through the consular court.

Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
#RachelWhiteread
Exhibitions

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2022
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.

Rachel Whiteread: Shy Sculpture
On the occasion of the unveiling of her latest Shy Sculpture, in Kunisaki, Japan, Rachel Whiteread joined curator and art historian Fumio Nanjo for a conversation about this ongoing series.They address the origins of these sculptures and the details of each project.

Augurs of Spring
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.

In Conversation
Tom Eccles and Kiki Smith on Rachel Whiteread
On the occasion of Artist Spotlight: Rachel Whiteread, curator Tom Eccles and artist Kiki Smith speak about the work of Rachel Whiteread through the lens of their personal friendships with her. They discuss her public projects from the early 1990s to the present, the relationship between drawing and sculpture in her practice, and the way her works reveal the memories embedded in familiar everyday objects.
In Conversation
Rachel Whiteread and Ann Gallagher
Rachel Whiteread speaks to Ann Gallagher about a new group of resin sculptures for an exhibition at Gagosian in London. They discuss the works’ emphasis on surface texture, light, and reflection.

Rachel Whiteread on Piero della Francesca
Rachel Whiteread writes about the Italian artist’s Baptism of Christ (after 1437) and what has drawn her to this painting, from her first experience of it at a young age to the present day.

Cast of Characters
James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.

Shy Sculpture: Nissen Hut
Rachel Whiteread’s public sculpture Nissen Hut was unveiled in October 2018 in Yorkshire’s Dalby Forest. Curator Tamsin Dillon explores the dynamic history of these structures and provides a firsthand account of the steps leading up to the work’s premiere.

For Notre-Dame
An exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, is raising funds to aid in the reconstruction of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris following the devastating fire of April 2019. Gagosian directors Serena Cattaneo Adorno and Jean-Olivier Després spoke to Jennifer Knox White about the generous response of artists and others, and what the restoration of this iconic structure means across the world.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019
The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.

Becoming Home
Rachel Whiteread’s US Embassy (Flat pack house) was unveiled in its permanent home at the new American embassy in Nine Elms, London, in early 2018. Virginia Shore, the curator for the London embassy project who worked with Whiteread to realize this site-specific commission, reflects on the history of prefabricated housing, the power of “home,” and the connecting force of art.
Fairs, Events & Announcements

Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2023
March 22–25, 2023
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 with a presentation of modern and contemporary works by international artists.
Jadé Fadojutimi, As usual, the season’s showers tend to linger, 2023 © Jadé Fadojutimi

Talk
ICRA Annual Conference 2022
Legacy: The Artist’s View
Thursday, December 1, 2022, 9:30am
Cromwell Place, London
icra.art
The International Catalogue Raisonné Association conference will give artists, their families, and catalogue raisonné authors space to articulate their thoughts on the theme of legacy. Engaging with the question of posterity, the conference asks how a family’s closeness to the artist can be both a blessing and a challenge, and thinks about ways in which later generations as well as nonfamily members can address issues surrounding an artist’s continued relevance. Edmund de Waal will be the keynote speaker and Michael Craig-Martin and Rachel Whiteread will contribute to the conference as well. The in-person and online event will include a question-and-answer session.
Photo: courtesy International Catalogue Raisonné Association

Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
December 1–3, 2022, booth D5
Miami Beach Convention Center
artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to present a selection of modern and contemporary works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Returning to Miami for the fair’s twentieth anniversary, the gallery is honored to have participated each year the fair has been held.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Gerhard Richter; © Amoako Boafo; © Richard Prince; © 2022 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Museum Exhibitions

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Photography’s Last Century
The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
February 17–May 21, 2023
Jepson Center, Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia
www.telfair.org
Photography’s Last Century celebrates the remarkable ascendancy of photography during the past hundred years, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee’s promised gift of over sixty photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where this exhibition originated. The collection is particularly notable for its breadth and depth of works by women artists, its sustained interest in the nude, and its focus on artists’ beginnings. Work by Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, and Rachel Whiteread is included.
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 2005 © Gregory Crewdson

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Jubiläumsausstellung—Special Guest Duane Hanson
October 30, 2022–January 8, 2023
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland
www.fondationbeyeler.ch
This exhibition, whose title translates to Anniversary Exhibition—Special Guest Duane Hanson, features more than one hundred works from the foundation’s collection, from modern to contemporary art, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the institution. Several hyperrealist sculptures by Duane Hanson enrich the presentation, opening up surprising perspectives on the exhibited artworks, architecture, staff, and visitors. Work by Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Alberto Giacometti, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Rachel Whiteread is included.
Installation view, Jubiläumsausstellung—Special Guest Duane Hanson, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 30, 2022–January 8, 2023. Artwork, front to back: © 2022 Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

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Rachel Whiteread in
Deep Time: Commissions for the Lake District Coast–Landmark Artwork Proposal Exhibition
September 10–October 9, 2022
Beacon Museum, Whitehaven, England
thebeacon-whitehaven.co.uk
This exhibition showcases proposals developed over the last two years in response to the varied landscapes and coastline of West Cumbria, where the Lake District National Park meets the Irish Sea. Organized as part of the public art program Deep Time: Commissions for the Lake District Coast, the show presents designs, models, and films by four artists, including Rachel Whiteread, who have been shortlisted to produce a new landmark artwork for the borough of Copeland.
Rachel Whiteread, Drigg Hut, 2022 © Rachel Whiteread

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Reframed
The Woman in the Window
May 4–September 4, 2022
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
Reframed: The Woman in the Window brings together more than fifty artworks from ancient civilizations to the present day to explore how artists have long used the motif of “the woman in the window” to elicit a particular kind of response, ranging from empathy to voyeurism. Featuring sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, film, and installation art, the exhibition aims to identify key geographic locations, cultures, and time periods in which this visual trope has had a particular meaning and what it reveals about issues of gender and visibility. Work by Jeff Wall and Rachel Whiteread is included.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (For WHP), 2015 © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Lucy Dawkins