0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail Xinhua, April 14, 2013
A former Turner Prize winning artist and one of only a handful of women British artists to exhibit at the Venice Biennale opened her new exhibition of sculptures in London on Friday.
The artist Rachel Whiteread has focused her latest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in London on castings of objects that at first seem commonplace, understated, and even boring.
"I've worked along very similar lines for over 25 years and working with casting and using a language of domestic objects and the things we have around us," Whiteread told Xinhua.
The most instantly striking works in Whiteread's latest show are three concrete castings of sheds.
"There is a piece in the same room as these three sheds -- three past sheds -- there is a box which is cast in bronze. There is this box, and there are a number of vitrines in the other part of the gallery. I call them abject objects; things which might be inside the sheds, or where you store things in."
She added that they were "things that have been forgotten about, you don't really pay attention to. You just put the old Christmas decorations in, or some gardening tools or whatever. So, in the main body of the exhibition, the other works are all cast in resin -- windows and doors."
Whiteread explained that resin was a recurring material in her work, "I have used resin a lot over the years, this work comes from, generally what I have is a vocabulary like doors and windows and floors and things that I have used a number of times."
The latest resin pieces, smaller in scale than the sheds, are casts of windows and doors, often in pastel colors.
Whiteread explained, "With these pieces in particular I have abstracted from them as much as I can, especially with the windows so they are all very minimal and I am hoping sublime, objects which look into nothing. They are things you could have on the wall and they are just a space of reverie, maybe."
Reviewed her career since her breakthrough as a young artist in the early 1990s, Whiteread said, "The earliest work that I made of this large scale was a piece called 'Ghost' which was the cast of the inside of a small domestic living room in a Victorian house. In terms of the larger house I then went on to make 'House' which was an entire house cast in concrete."
Whiteread's work has been acclaimed internationally, "Ghost" is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
She also reached international fame with the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in the Austrian capital of Vienna, commissioned to commemorate the Austrian Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust in the Second World War.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)