Rachel Whiteread

b.1963

Untitled

  • 2005
  • Digital print
  • Purchased, 2010
  • Reproduced with permission © Rachel Whiteread
  • 594 x 841mm
  • 2010/024

In 1993, Rachel Whiteread won the Turner Prize for her full-scale cast concrete sculpture of the inside of a London terraced house. The positioning of its windows and doors were instantly familiar to anyone who grew up in such a house. At the same time it was fundamentally strange to see the small volume of the rooms that were once inhabited by families, and in which whole lives were played out. In this related print, Whiteread repeats the form of a door and jamb from a childhood home. The familiar past is conjured up and made strange by repetition in the present.

(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)

Exhibition History

earlier labels about this work
  • De-Building, 5 February – 22 February 2011

    Along with Fiona Connor’s major installation and Billy Apple’s 'Censure Realised', Rachel Whiteread’s 'Untitled' is one of a cluster of architecturally themed works purchased recently for Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection. Though Whiteread works more often with domestic than gallery spaces, she appears in De-Building as the influential creator of a peculiarly haunting kind of architectural sculpture – plaster casts of rooms and spaces through which people once moved.