Rachel Whiteread
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. 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.
If you own a work by Rachel Whiteread
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.