Rachel Whiteread valuation
Casts the space inside and underneath things — a room, a bath, a house, a staircase.
Rachel Whiteread was born in London in 1963 and studied at Brighton and the Slade.
What a work by Rachel Whiteread is worth
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Bio
Rachel Whiteread was born in London in 1963 and studied at Brighton and the Slade. The work casts negative space: the underside of a chair, the inside of a hot water bottle, the air in a room. Ghost, made in 1990, is the cast interior of a Victorian front room. House, in 1993, filled an entire condemned terraced house in Bow with concrete and removed the walls; it won her the Turner Prize, the first woman to take it, and was demolished by the local council within months. The Holocaust Memorial in Vienna's Judenplatz is a library cast inside out. She was made a Dame in 2019.
Materials are the identifying and the limiting factor: plaster, resin, rubber, concrete and dental plaster all behave differently, and resin in particular yellows with light exposure in a way that is not reversible. Many works exist in small editions rather than as unique objects and this is not obvious from the piece. Weight and installation requirements are a genuine part of any transaction. Drawings — often on graph paper, with correction fluid and collage — are numerous and are collected in their own right. Studio and Gagosian documentation is the reference.
At a glance
- Born
- 1963, London
- Movement
- Contemporary art
Public works, and Demolished
Beyond House, Whiteread's public works include Water Tower, a resin cast of a water tank set on a New York rooftop in 1998; Monument, a clear resin cast of the Fourth Plinth set upside down on top of it in Trafalgar Square in 2001; and Embankment, some fourteen thousand cast boxes stacked in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2005. Tate Britain gave her a retrospective in 2017.
Her first print portfolio, Demolished, published by the Paragon Press in 1996, is twelve screenprints made from her own slides of tower blocks being demolished on three Hackney estates between 1993 and 1995, in an edition of thirty-five with ten sets of artist's proofs. Sheets from it are often sold singly. Later prints and multiples, several also published by the Paragon Press, are documented with their edition sizes, and a print should match its published details.
Closet, Ghost and One Hundred Spaces
Whiteread learned casting at a workshop with the sculptor Richard Wilson and was taught at the Slade by Phyllida Barlow. Her first sculpture, Closet, made while still a student, is a plaster cast of the inside of a wardrobe covered in black felt, and Shallow Breath of 1988 casts the underside of a bed. Ghost, bought by Charles Saatchi, missed the Momart warehouse fire of 2004 because it had just been moved, and went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington that autumn.
A DAAD residency in Berlin in 1992 and 1993 produced Untitled (Room), the cast of a room she built herself, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997 she showed Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), resin casts of the space beneath chairs. The year House won her the Turner Prize, it also brought her the K Foundation's mock award for the worst British artist.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
