Born in London in 1963, Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists. Her work is characterised by its use of industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal. With these she casts the surfaces and volume in and around everyday objects and architectural space, creating evocative sculptures that range from the intimate to the monumental. Whiteread came to prominence in 1990 with her work House 1993-4, a life-sized cast of the interior of a condemned terraced house in London's East End, which existed for a few months before it was controversially demolished. She subsequently won the Turner Prize in 1993, the first woman to do so, and has gone on to create major public projects ever since, notably the Holocaust Memorial 1995 in Vienna, and Cabin 2015 in New York. A major mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain (Whiteread's first) will bring together her iconic works and series (including Untitled (Staircase) 2001), along with new work made especially for the exhibition.
New texts will explore a range of themes in Whiteread's practice, from Ghost and the domestic, to public commissions, to housing and the wider social context of her work. An extended biography and bibliography will update available information on the artist. The book will be beautifully designed and illustrated throughout and will feature colour reproductions of all exhibited works, making it the most significant overview of the artist to date. A major new publication on an artist who has single-handedly expanded the barriers of contemporary sculpture.