✕ ✕
Turning tips into memories
Login
Signup

You have reached the limit of free articles.


To enjoy unlimited access to Culture Whisper sign up for FREE.
Find out more about Culture Whisper


Sign up by Email or Facebook.

Please fix the following input errors:

  • dummy

Each week, we sent newsletters and communication featuring articles, our latest tickets invitations, and exclusive offers.

Occasional information about discounts, special offers and promotions.


OR
LOG IN

OR
  • LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK

Thanks for signing up to Culture Whisper.
Please check your inbox for a confirmation email and click the link to verify your account.



EXPLORE CULTURE WHISPER
✕ ✕
Turning tips into memories
Login
Signup

Please fix the following input errors:

  • dummy
Forgot your username or password?
Don't have an account? Sign Up

OR
  • LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK

If you click «Log in with Facebook» and are not a Culture Whisper user, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and to our Privacy Policy, which includes our Cookie Use

Turning tips into memories

Get started Login
  • Home
  • Going Out
    • Things to do
    • Food & Drink
    • Theatre
    • Visual Arts
    • Cinema
    • Kids
    • Festival
    • Gigs
    • Dance
    • Classical Music
    • Opera
    • Immersive
    • Talks
  • Staying In
    • TV
    • Books
    • Cook
    • Podcast
    • Design
    • Netflix
  • Life & Style
    • Beauty
    • Fashion
    • Gifting
    • Wellbeing
    • Lifestyle
    • Shopping
    • Jewellery
  • Explore
  • Kids
  • Benefits
  • Membership
  • Get Started
  • Membership
  • Benefits
Get the Best of London Life, Culture and Style
By entering my email I agree to the CultureWhisper Privacy Policy (we won`t share data & you can unsubscribe anytime).
Visual Arts

Review, Rachel Whiteread exhibition, Tate Britain ★★★★★

12 Sep 17 – 21 Jan 18, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Walk through a career and a life story: It's time to celebrate one of the most radical abstract sculptors of our time

By CW Contributor on 12/9/2017

11 CW readers are interested
Rachel Whiteread, Line-up, 2007-8
Rachel Whiteread, Line-up, 2007-8
Review, Rachel Whiteread exhibition, Tate Britain 4 Review, Rachel Whiteread exhibition, Tate Britain Maud McCaffrey
The one hundred coloured resin blocks currently dominating Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries stop you in your tracks. The field boasts one hundred casts of the space underneath chairs. Resembling ‘opalescent ice-cubes’, ‘solidified jellies’, bars of translucent soaps, or, more morbidly, unidentifiable gravestones, the blocks appear to march in formation.


Despite the equidistant spaces between casts, these monuments to domesticity, configured in a five by twenty grid, stand impenetrable. Imprinted with original markings, scratches and cracks, Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) illustrates, above all, Rachel Whiteread’s play with negative and positive space.


TRY CULTURE WHISPER
Receive free tickets & insider tips to unlock the best of London — direct to your inbox
Since the late 80s Whiteread has dedicated her practice to making sculptures cast from the space inside or around everyday forms. Her sculptures are rough, industrial objects, made from materials such as resin, wire, concrete, chairs and cans. But Whiteread’s talent lies in her ability to transform these everyday, household objects into poetic fossils: what usually goes unnoticed becomes intimate and eternal.



Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Room 101), 2003


In homage to the breadth and complexity of her vocabulary, Tate Britain’s current exhibition, Rachel Whiteread, spans three decades and presents a diverse body of textures and materials.


House remains Whiteread's best-known work. In 1993, Whiteread, then one of Saatchi's YBA set, arrived at a property in East London. The house, the sole remnant of a Victorian terrace, was set for demolition. She sprayed the interior walls with concrete to create a cast and made life-size, inverse replica of the home. House was a monument to the lives lived within it – a kind of ghost; a tribute to domesticity; memory made solid. The artwork won Whiteread the Turner Prize – she became the first woman to have done so. Four months later, Tower Hamlets council demolished the sculpture. It seems right, given the work’s cultural significance, that the exhibition kicks off with a reel of original film footage of House’s construction.


But Whiteread's oeuvre goes far beyond House. Celebrated works referenced in the exhibition include the Holocaust memorial in the Judenplatz in Vienna, the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – for which the maquettes are on display – a monster cast of Book Corridors, and of course, Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), 1995.




Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Clear Torso), 1993


Alongside the larger sculptures are more intimate works detailing the inside spaces of personal domestic objects including hot water bottles, loo paper rolls, and cardboard boxes. But it's not sculpture for sculpture's sake. Each object packs an emotional punch. The cardboard box that inspired, Embankment, for example was found in her late mother's house. The inverted concrete cast of a single-storey library room – her Viennese Holocaust memorial – comprises rows of books with their spines facing inwards: a wordless tribute to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered silently during the Holocaust.


Aside from sculpture, the array of preparatory drawings, sketches and photographs garnishing the back wall permits a longed-for insight into Whiteread’s laborious and time-consuming casting techniques. In terms of palette, only the odd splash of black punctuates the wash of whites, lilacs and rose pinks.


All in all, it's an arresting show. But Tate’s decision to abandon the gallery partition walls is the curatorial masterstroke. Walking through an immense open space, with no sense of formal direction, is liberating but surprisingly daunting. The open space allows the sculptures to breathe; consequently, they engage in silent dialogue. They entrance with their eerie ghostliness. They tell stories of fleeting moments long since forgotten.


Meander through a career and a life story: It's time to celebrate one of the most radical abstract sculptors of our time.













What Review, Rachel Whiteread exhibition, Tate Britain
Where Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG | MAP
Nearest tube Pimlico (underground)
When 12 Sep 17 – 21 Jan 18, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Price £16.50, Concessions £14.50
Website Click here for more information



Most popular

Culture to see you through the weekend
Things to do in London this weekend: 22 - 24 January
Olly Alexander in It's A Sin, Channel 4 (Photo: Channel 4)
It's A Sin, Channel 4 review
Jessie Buckley in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Netflix (Photo: Netflix)
Oscars 2021 predictions: what will be nominated?

Editor's Picks

Sophie Ryder, Salisbury Cathedral
The best female sculptors you've never heard of
In-the-know art exhibitions online
In-the-know art exhibitions online
Portrait of the artist as a young man... Jean-Michel Basquiat. Photograph: Lizzie Himmel/AP/Brooklyn Museum
'Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years' - the documentary everyone's talking about
Sarah Bahbah, from 'Sex and Take Out' Series
Young artists to watch at START Art Fair

What members say

    Did not get it

    Sandrine Roch

Sign up to CW’s newsletter
By entering my email I agree to the CultureWhisper Privacy Policy (we won`t share data & you can unsubscribe anytime).
11

Art

Exhibition

Summer

London

Contemporary Art

Rachel Whiteread

You might like

  • Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect, 1903

    Impressionists in London, Tate Britain, review ★★★★★

  • START Art Fair 2019, Saatchi Gallery

    START Art Fair 2019, Saatchi Gallery

  • Philippe Apeloig, service Diane, décor Galaxie, 2017. PAD London 2017.

    PAD art fair London 2017, Berkeley Square



  • The Culture Whisper team
  • What is Culture Whisper membership
  • Corporate membership
  • Give a gift membership
  • Retrieve a gift membership
  • Contact us
  • Press
  • FAQ
  • Privacy
  • Terms and conditions
  • Cookies
  • Discover
  • Venues
  • Restaurants
  • Stations
  • Boroughs
Sign up to CW’s newsletter
By entering my email I agree to the CultureWhisper Privacy Policy (we won`t share data & you can unsubscribe anytime).
×