b. 1963, London

Born in 1963, Rachel Whiteread studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic (1982–85) and shifted her focus to sculpture as a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art (1985–87). In the early 1990s she began to receive international attention as part of a stylistically diverse group referred to as the Young British Artists. Whiteread has distinguished herself from her contemporaries by creating an innovative body of work that reflects a quiet, contemplative spirit. She has received such accolades as the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize in 1993 and the award for Best Young Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Whiteread is perhaps best known for her enigmatic resin and plaster sculptures, which solidify the negative space within familiar architectural sites—rooms, stairways, bookshelves, bathtubs, and chairs. Early titles like Shallow Breath (1988), Ghost (1990), and Torso (1992–95) directly underscore the profound corporeal and psychological reactions rallied by Whiteread’s encasement of the intimate spaces we inhabit daily.

Among Whiteread’s most prominent pieces have been her works designed for public spaces. For one of her early works, House (1993), she encased the interior of an entire home scheduled for demolition in London in concrete, leaving behind a ghostly remnant on that residential block. For Water Tower (1998), the artist created a translucent-resin version of the ubiquitous rooftop cylindrical tanks that populate New York City’s skyline. While House and Water Tower inhabited alternative sites—London’s East End and a rooftop in New York’s Soho district—and invite accidental glimpses rather than intended pilgrimages, her later works occupied more central spaces. Such public works include Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna’s Judenplatz (2000), her Monument in Trafalgar Square in London (2001) and Embankment in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2005).

Throughout Europe and the U.S., her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries, including two mid-career retrospectives organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London (2001) and the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2001), which then traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2002. Whiteread lives and works in London.