theEYE: Rachel Whiteread
The Genres
The Synopsis
Rachel Whiteread has created some of the most remarkable and resonant public sculptures of recent years. House (now demolished) cast in concrete the interior of a terraced house in London's East End. Holocaust Memorial is a moving memorial in Vienna to the victims of the holocaust in Austria. Yet she also frequently works on a domestic scale, casting in plaster and resin the spaces inside, around and beneath furniture, floors and staircases. Her art is a uniquely poetic response to the everyday, and to the haunting themes of memory and mortality. In this video profile Rachel Whiteread speaks about the ideas that prompted a number of her best-known sculptures, including Ghost, her first cast of the space inside a complete room, and Monument, which established a shimmering presence in London's Trafalgar Square during the summer of 2001