RACHEL WHITEREAD (b. 1963) UNTITLED (AMBER FL

Provenance
Luhring Augustine Gallery, NEW YORK
The Collection of Donna and Howard Stone, CHICAGO

Exhibited
CHICAGO, Museum of Contemporary Art, July 10-September 26, 1998
OPTIONS 46: RACHEL WHITEREAD Kunsthalle Basel, August 21 October 30 1994
PHILADELPHIA, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, February 9-April 16, 1995 and Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, May 9-July 9, 1995, RACHEL WHITEREAD, n.p. (illustrated)

Literature
T. Kellein and R. Whiteread, RACHEL WHITEREAD, BASEL, 1994, n.p. (illustrated)

I LOOK LIKE THE YOU I TURNED INTO, BEING YOUR IMPRINT. YOU ARE EXACTLY WHAT IS LOST SINCE ONLY YOU WOULD FIT THE MOULD WHICH I HAVE BECOME

U. Grosenick, ed. WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY, COLOGNE, 2001, p. 550

Over the past 15 years, Rachel Whiteread has garnered consistently high acclaim for her ghostly sculptures of emptiness. Her work is rooted in the domestic realm, where she tends to cast the negative spaces below, inside and around pre-existing objects. Using a wide range of casting materials, the artist has solidified the vacancies beneath chairs, tables, sinks and bathtubs. She has lent material substance to the dark voids inside drawers and closets. She has also cast the empty interiors of rooms and an entire house. The resultant sculptures are spare, elegant forms that invoke the original objects by way of their absence. In the early 1990s, Whiteread created a discrete series of works that inverted her typical sculptural strategy. Remaining committed to the aesthetic vocabulary of the home, she cast a number of used mattresses in rubber, wax, plaster and foam. These sculptures, however, were realized as positive volumes, replicating the solid mass of the original bedding. The present work demonstrates both the formal simplicity and emotional complexity of Whiteread's sculptural vision.