Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread is a British artist who works with casting. She plays with reminiscing familiar objects, but inverting the occupiable or usable space. By taking an object and casting the negative space, she frees it of its utility. She works on a scale of a single human body, like chairs and doors, and a scale that fits multiple human bodies, like a room and a house. Much of her work ties in with memories, and often negative ones. By casting an area that once was the site of trauma, like House or Holocaust Memorial, she allows the space to no longer exist as what it once was, giving the memories a new start as smooth concrete relief. Our textbook summarizes her work as “a contemporary presence around a historical absence”.

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