24 Facts About Rachel Whiteread

Dame Rachel Whiteread was born on 20 April 1963 and is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts.

Rachel Whiteread was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993.

Rachel Whiteread was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2006 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to art.

Rachel Whiteread's mother, Patricia Whiteread, who was an artist, died in 2003 at the age of 72.

Rachel Whiteread's father, Thomas Whiteread, was a geography teacher, polytechnic administrator and lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, who died when Whiteread was studying at art school in 1988.

Rachel Whiteread took a workshop on casting with the sculptor Richard Wilson and began to realize the possibilities in casting objects.

Rachel Whiteread was briefly at the Cyprus College of Art.

Rachel Whiteread began to exhibit in 1987, with her first solo exhibition coming in 1988.

Many of Rachel Whiteread's works are casts of ordinary domestic objects and, in numerous cases, their so-called negative space.

Rachel Whiteread made a plaster cast of the interior of a wooden wardrobe and covered it with black felt.

Rachel Whiteread created Shallow Breath, the cast of the underside of a bed, made not long after her father died.

Rachel Whiteread used plaster to cast the parlor walls and ceiling in sections and assembled them on a metal frame.

In October 1993 Rachel Whiteread completed House, the cast of a Victorian terrace house.

Rachel Whiteread had begun considering casting an entire house in 1991.

Rachel Whiteread finished the interior of a room-sized box with wallpaper, windows, and door before casting.

Rachel Whiteread was the first woman to win a Turner Prize.

In 1998, Rachel Whiteread made Water Tower as part of a grant for New York City's Public Art Fund.

Rachel Whiteread's sculpture was an 11-ton resin cast of the plinth itself, made by Mike Smith Studio, London, which stood upside down, creating a sort of mirror-image of the plinth.

Rachel Whiteread sees it not as a space to be filled, but as an absence to be acknowledged, and she does it well.

Rachel Whiteread cited the end scenes of both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Citizen Kane as visual precursors; she spoke of the death of her mother and a period of upheaval which involved packing and moving comparable boxes.

Rachel Whiteread created this small, plaster sculpture for a charity auction by the Prior Weston PTA, in support of the Prior Weston primary school in Islington, London.

Rachel Whiteread was one of the five artists shortlisted for the Angel of the South project in January 2008.

Rachel Whiteread turns the boathouse inside out thereby capturing a moment in time.

Rachel Whiteread uses this idea in order to produce a negative space that had existed but no longer does.