Rachel Whiteread

(British, born 1963)

Rachel Whiteread is an influential contemporary English sculptor known for her concrete casts of domestic spaces, architecture, and objects. Whiteread’s sculptures are concerned with the negative space present between humans and the places they inhabit. “I make all this stuff in the studio, but I also work on these white elephants—like House or Untitled Monument—things that are incredibly ambitious, take an awful long time to do, involve a lot of controversy, an awful lot of people, and don't make any money particularly, but it's just because I need to make them,” she has said. Born on April 20, 1963 in Ilford, United Kingdom, Whiteread went on to study painting at Brighton Polytechnic and later sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. It was during this time that she was included in the group known as the Young British Artists alongside Tracey Emin and Gary Hume, and began working with concrete casts. Over the years that followed, the artist’s work has continued to grow in scale, as evidenced in her Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (1997) and House (1993), a life-size concrete interior of a Victorian-era house. The artist continues to live and work in London, United Kingdom. Today, Whiteread’s works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.