Art · 21st century
born 1963 · British
Sculpture — casting negative space
Rachel Whiteread casts the space that objects and buildings leave behind: the air under a chair, the inside of a hot-water bottle, the rooms of a condemned terraced house. In 1993 her concrete cast of a whole East End house won her the Turner Prize, the first awarded to a woman, and was demolished within weeks.
A concrete cast of the inside of a condemned Victorian terraced house in the East End, demolished eleven weeks after it was unveiled (1993)
Formerly Grove Road, Bow, London (destroyed 1994)
House, commissioned by Artangel; the council voted to demolish it on the night she won the Turner Prize
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A sealed concrete library in a Viennese square, its books turned spine-inwards, commemorating 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews (2000)
Judenplatz, Vienna
The 'Nameless Library'
Image: Unknown · CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
A resin cast of an empty plinth, set upside down on the plinth itself in Trafalgar Square (2001)
Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, London
Monument — eleven tonnes of clear resin, mirroring the plinth beneath it
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A translucent resin cast of the inside of a wooden rooftop tank, raised above the streets of SoHo (1998)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Made for the Public Art Fund; later given to MoMA
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A plaster cast of the inside of a north London sitting room, with the fireplace pressed into it in reverse (1990)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Ghost, the breakthrough work and the rehearsal for House
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Fourteen thousand white casts of the insides of cardboard boxes, stacked into an Arctic landscape in a former power station (2005)
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
The Unilever Series commission, prompted by clearing her mother's house
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia