Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread – Workshop with Richard Wilson; studies with Phyllida Barlow

Rachel Whiteread was born in London on 20 April 1963. She inherited her artistic talent probably from her mother, Patricia Whiteread, who was also active as an artist. Her visit to a workshop by the sculptor Richard Wilson affirmed Whiteread’s interest in sculpture which, after a short stopover at the Cyprus College of Art in Cyprus, led her to the Slade School of Art in London to study sculpture from 1985 under the renowned contemporary artist Phyllida Barlow. Whiteread graduated in 1987 with a Master of Arts and initially worked as an invigilator at the Serpentine Gallery and at Highgate Cemetery where she repaired damaged caskets. She first exhibited her own work in 1987, with her first solo exhibition following a year later in 1988. These early small successes enabled Whiteread to apply for several bursaries in order to finance further projects.

International success with negative voids

Rachel Whiteread often produces casts of profane household objects, whereby what interests her is the negative space. It is precisely the space that is not filled with selected objects such as tables and chairs that form the character and shape of her art. Every time, it is a fascinating experiment for the artist, unearthing the reside of years of use and making the history of an object tangible. This concept stands behind the so-called voids for which Rachel Whiteread is internationally known today. Almost all of the artist’s later successes and projects evolve out of this basic idea, such as the Shy Sculptures, one of her most recent series, the sculptures of which are ‘shy’ and ‘timid’, primarily because Whiteread installs them in hard-to-reach places. 

Numerous honours and prestigious commissions

In 2000, Rachel Whiteread designed the memorial for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah in Vienna in the style of her internationally successful voids. It takes the form of a sculpture of a library with its books facing outwards, i.e., spine inwards – a double image for Judaism as a book religion and the cultural gap created by the extermination of European Jews. Rachel Whiteread has received prizes and honors for her art and was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in London in 1993 – the artist was aged only 30 at the time. The unusual honour was for the work House, for which Whiteread cast a complete Victorian style house in concrete. The monumental sculpture was on view for a time in East London, before it was replaced by a green park. 

Rachel Whiteread lives and works in her hometown of London where she has set up a workshop in a former synagogue with her long-term partner and fellow artist Marcus Taylor; the couple have two children.