Rachel Whiteread (b.1963)

About the artist

Rachel Whiteread is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, best known for both her intimately scaled sculptures of everyday objects – typically cast from plaster, resin, rubber, or concrete – and her major outdoor public commissions and monumental sculptural works such as House in London (1993-94), Water Tower in New York (1998), and Holocaust Memorial in Vienna (2000).

Born in 1963, Whiteread lives and works in London. She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic, England, from 1982 to 1985, and sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art, England, from 1985 to 1987. Her poignant works explore the imprints of human life on the objects and environments that define our daily existence.

In Whiteread’s sculptures, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces are transformed into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through her work, Whiteread makes visible those things that ordinarily go unseen. She frees her subject matter—from domestic objects to entire structures—from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory.

Collections include Tate, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent institutional exhibitions include Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2008); Drawings, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Tate Britain, London (2017–18, traveled to Belvedere 21, Vienna; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Saint Louis Art Museum, through 2019); Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA (2019); and Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy (2023).

Public commissions include House (London, 1993–94), Water Tower (New York, 1998), Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna (2000), Monument (Trafalgar Square, London, 2001), US Embassy (Flat pack house) (2013–15, installed at the US Embassy, London, in 2018), Cabin (Discovery Hill, Governors Island, New York, 2016), and Kunisaki House (Kunisaki, Japan, 2021–22). Whiteread is the recipient of the 1993 Turner Prize, among other awards, and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2019.