Summary
Whiteread cast parts of her body during her student days at Brighton Polytechnic and at the Slade School of Art in London in the mid 1980s. In 1988, driven by ‘an autobiographical impulse, using something familiar, to do with my childhood’ (Whiteread quoted in Rachel Whiteread 1992, p.8), she cast the inside of a wardrobe as a dense, solid form, which she then covered in black felt. This work is titled Closet (collection the artist). For Whiteread, giving tangible form to the internal space of the wardrobe was connected with ‘an idea of comfort, of something representing security’ (Whiteread quoted in Rachel Whiteread 1992, p.8). At the same time the dark, block-like nature of the piece evokes death and entombment. These two themes – the comfort derived from humble objects of intimate daily ritual, together with the more troubling aspects of bodily absence and death – coexist in almost all of her subsequent work, which has involved casting the spaces underneath beds, around baths and sinks, as well as a range of mattresses and mortuary slabs… (read more)
Other works of art you may be interested in
