Rachel Whiteread - House

Houses are loaded: actions of intimacy, decadence, indecency, and humanity take place inside walls of stone, metal, wood, and glass. But what of the space itself, where events happen, where emptiness defines the surrounding physical elements? Is it possible to have a visual relationship with something we cannot see? Where a familiar Victorian structure once stood, Rachel Whiteread has left only a concrete object. After using the frame of the home as a mold for the new structure, Whiteread removed the traditional exterior materials to reveal a new solid object in the space and shape of the old domicile's interior. Imprints of windows and doors leave traces and the audience must re-evaluate its relationship with the space: emptiness is now solid and a solid form is now empty. Whiteread reveals, in fact, that nothing has always been something. Whiteread's works often intimate that something has been lost, but sometimes they reveal the opposite -- sometimes the viewer discovers something they always knew existed but could not identify visually. Her sculptures investigate the relationship between matter and its corresponding negative space, between what we have imagined lost and what we have discovered found.