Rachel Whiteread

Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful. This statement is the subject of a painting created by my son that hangs proudly in his New York City apartment. He’s a husband (as of 10/27/12) and father (as of 12/16/16). He carries that sense of things to this day.

I am reminded of his determined optimism as I view the comprehensive survey of the English artist/sculpture Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) at the Saint Louis Art Museum on display March 17-June 9, 2019. The Exhibition brings together 90 works that charts her career from early works to the present. Ordinary and often overlooked objects are cast like a piece she calls (untitled) Pink Torso, a cast of a hot water bottle, or Line Up, a series of toilet paper rolls with color added to an array of what would be a throw-away items in a typical home. A series of doors or details or floors or the undersides of chairs all are repurposed and represented in resin, plaster, concrete or casts of readymade forms that are arranged on a manner that help one contemplate and reimagine contemporary art.

Whiteread also takes on projects in her practice that are on a scale of architectural magnitude. She has been called master of the miniature and the monumental. I like that. Employing traditional casting methods and materials that are commonly used in the preparation of sculptures rather than for the finished object like plaster, rubber and resin, Rachel Whiteread makes sculptures of the spaces in, under and on everyday objects.

A video available on YouTube gives us a sense of the unpretentious approach Whiteread has applied in over 30 years in her practice. She sips a red wine and is interviewed for Tate Talks in front of an audience at The Tate in London. https://youtu.be/WPalyXFpFLE

Rachel Whiteread became the first woman to receive the Turner Prize with her sculpture House (1993), a replica of the interior of a condemned London house created by filling a house with concrete and stripping away the mold. The Turner Prize (named for artist  J.M.W. Turner) is given to a British artist as an artist working primarily in Britain or an artist born in Britain working globally. Whiteread won the commission to design Vienna's Holocaust memorial.

The Saint Louis Art Museum acquired Detached III, a large-scale sculpture by Rachel Whiteread in 2017. The sculpture can be found near the museum sculpture gatden. Whiteread describes here casting process as mummifying the air. Casts of the negative spaces under and inside everyday objects and structures results in scale and surface detail. These sculptures are uncannily faithful to their molds. Detached III is part of a series of concrete sculptures depicting the space within garden sheds.