The artist
Her work has had a profound impact both in this country and internationally and she has produced several significant public sculptures. Although Whiteread’s work is often on a monumental scale, its central preoccupation is to represent apparently familiar domestic objects and interior spaces. Using a method of inverted casting from found, often personal, objects, Whiteread makes present the spaces in, under, on or between things. The physical representation of memory and absence is key to Whiteread’s work and, by frequently destroying the original object in the casting process, she explores the theme of loss.
Born in London in 1963, Whiteread studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. She was awarded the Turner Prize in 1993 just after creating House (1993; destroyed 1994), a life-sized cast of the entire interior of a condemned terraced house in London's East End, made by spraying liquid concrete into the building's empty shell before its external walls were removed.
Whiteread's winning proposal for the Holocaust memorial for the Judenplatz in Vienna was one of the most prestigious sculptural commissions in Europe in the 1990s, and involved placing the cast interior of a library, including the imprint of books, in the centre of the square. It was unveiled in October 2000.
Whiteread represented the UK at the 1997 Venice Biennale and created Monument for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2001. She lives and works in London and her work is represented in many private and public collections worldwide.
