Rachel Whiteread has installed a new installation on Governor’s Island, an immense, cast-concrete cabin that sits just at the edge of the island.  “I wanted to have something that was very humble but had a sort of idea of solitude and showed the city from a different angle,” Whiteread says. “I like the idea of being there on your own with the Statue of Liberty and the site of the former World Trade Center over the water.” (more…)

The New York Times notes an increased interest in artists over recent years in concerns of space, perception and dimensionality, drawing lines between the study of quantum physics, spatial politics, and work by artists like Rachel Whiteread and Matthew Ritchie.  “The formulation of the laws of perspective in the 14th century gave artists permission to see everything in a new way,” Ritchie says. “Now your sky isn’t flat. You’ve got a proper sky with depth, and now your angels can get up to some real mischief.” (more…)

The Guardian has published a special series this week, titled “TheSeven Ages of an Artist,” interviewing a set of artists including Laure Prouvost, Richard Deacon, Rachel Whiteread, and others, as they reflect on the different stages of their career, considered from their varying vantage points in age and experience.  “I’m lucky my work started to be supported in my 30s – it is hard to be picked up really young, because you have not tried enough and have not got lost enough,” Prouvost says. (more…)

Rachel Whiteread, Looking Out (Installation View), via Jessica Holburn

Ambient and solitary, Rachel Whiteread continues her distinct vocabulary, where the intangible and tangible trace a point of convergence. Renowned for imbuing commonplace or discarded objects with nuanced significance, self-described as an “authority to forgotten things,” the artist has opened a show of historical work at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick location.  Informed by Bruce Nauman’s casting of negative space, Eva Hesse’s uncanny use of materials and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made, Whiteread casts overlooked objects to evoke a paradoxical amalgamation of space. Concepts of memory and abandonment are investigated through a kind of cyclical, self-perpetuating visual language where drawing and sculpture function in parallel. (more…)

Rachel Whiteread, Detached (Installation View) © Rachel Whiteread. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Photo Mike Bruce

Gagosian London is currently exhibiting Detached, a self-reflexive exhibition by Rachel Whiteread that calls to attention the artistic process itself, abstracting and casting everyday objects into large scale sculptures meant to symbolize the detachment from reality that an artist experiences during his or her process.

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Someone has stolen Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (24 Switches) from a central London gallery. The theft of the panel of light switches made by the artist is valued at £24,000. The work would most likely not even be recognizable as art to the garden variety thief, and any reputable dealer could identify it based on the stamp on the back and track provenance, thus confounding the gallery and its insurers as to who might have stolen it. (more…)

Tino Sehgal via The Independent

Anglo-German artist Tino Sehgal opened ‘These Associations’ in the Tate Modern‘s Turbine Hall yesterday. As the 13th Unilever Commission, the performance art installation is the museum’s first live commission. ‘These Associations’ features shifts of around 50 participants at a time, partaking in different games, dances, and social interactions designed by Sehgal.

Turbine Hall, the venue for ‘These Associations’ via BBC News

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The Guardian explores Rachel Whiteread‘s perspectives on the changes in East London, the attention and criticism her art receives, and her newly commissioned, frieze at the Whitechapel art gallery, which is one of the key pieces of the London 2012 festival.

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‬The Guardian interviews Turner prize winner Rachel Whiteread, revealing the thought process and controversy behind her latest endeavor, a frieze on London gallery Whitechapel. “You can’t make a good piece of public art by consensus; it’s just not possible. So I really had to stick my heels in,” says Whiteread.

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Untitled (2010) by Rachel Whiteread, via Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery on Davies Street in London is an exhibition of drawings and new sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. The sculptural work is the latest in a series created for outdoor spaces, produced in soft materials such as plaster, rubber and resin. Five cubic forms of varying size, texture, and color are positioned in a straight line. A principle theme in Whiteread’s oeuvre, the new sculptures rely on form to reflect upon the surrounding negative space.

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George Condo, Cocktail Drinker (1995) All images via Luhring Augustine

In commemoration of their 25th anniversary, Luhring Augustine is hosting an exhibition titled, “Twenty Five.” The show pulls together works from the gallery’s past and present by artists including Janine Antoni, Nobuyoshi Araki, Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, Larry Clark, George Condo, Gregory Crewdson, William Daniels, Günter Förg, Zarina Hashmi, Johannes Kahrs, Jon Kessler, Martin Kippenberger, Ragnar Kjartansson, Luisa Lambri, Glenn Ligon, Paul McCarthy, Yasumasa Morimura, Daido Moriyama, Reinhard Mucha, David Musgrave, Cady Nolan, Alberta Oehlen, Ed Paschke, Jack Pierson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Stephen Prina, Pipilotti Rist, Josh Smith, Joel Sternfeld, Tunga, Guido van der Werve, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Steve Wolfe, and Christopher Wool.

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Installation view, Luhring Augustine

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Rachel Whiteread, Stairs, 1995

Leading contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread is best known for her sculpture, which almost exclusively springs from the premise of capturing the negative space in and around architectural structures. Now for the first time a museum has ventured to shed some light on her relatively neglected drawings, in a retrospective display at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Perhaps previously overlooked as preliminaries to a final sculptural piece, or just obscured by the monumentality of her public works, it is an interesting choice, and a critical one, in order to assert the importance of this ignored portion of an artist’s oeuvre. Whiteread herself affirms the personal import of these works when she described them thus: “My drawings are a diary of my work.” [Press Release] In the press release this metaphor is aptly extended as they describe how “like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections.”

Rachel Whiteread, Vitrine Objects

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Installation View  All photographs are via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia street, London is the exhibition titled “Crash, Homage to J.G. Ballard” , a group show dedicated, as the name suggests, to the oeuvre of J.D. Ballard, a prominent British novelist and short-story writer, a representative of the New Wave movement in science fiction.  The exhibition was put together to pay tribute to the enormous cultural influence of J.D. Ballard’s fiction on many visual artists. The impressive selection of works by  such prominent artists as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, AndyWarhol and Helmut Newton illustrates profound engagement of the writer with the works of visual artists of his generation and their mutual influence.

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PR photo of Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, via the Guardian UK.

Noted British sculptor and Turner Prize winner Antony Gormley is seeking to recruit up to 2,400 volunteers to participate in his latest work, One & Other, atop Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.

Participants will have an entire hour atop the plinth, and are free to do anything legal. Gormley has commented that he expects there to be “naked riots,” and that he would be “upset if at least one person did not take their clothes off.” The only requirements for partake in One and Other are that participants are over 16 years of age and are residents of the UK while the show is on display. Applications will be accepted through a website designed for that purpose, and Sky Arts will broadcast coverage of the plinth. Video coverage of the plinth will also be streaming live at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The website will notify participants in three tranches starting in April.

On the motivation and objective behind the ‘sculpture,’ Gormley had this to say:

“The idea behind One & Other is a simple one. Through elevation onto the plinth and removal from the common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, symbol, emblem – a point of reference, focus and thought. In the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues to specific individuals, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society. It could be tragic but it could also be funny.” — via the Guardian UK

Gormley won the opportunity to display One and Other through a process run by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group. Other artists who have exhibited on the plinth include Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread and Thomas Schutte.

Sculpture site: One and Other
Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth: make an exhibition of yourself [Times UK]
Antony Gormley wants you for the fourth plinth [Guardian UK]
Trafalgar Square fourth plinth art ‘will cause arrests’ [Telegraph UK]
Gormley on his plinth: ‘I would be very upset if nobody took their clothes off’ [Independent]
Gormley Invites Brits to Lord Over Trafalgar Square [ArtInfo]
Volunteer plea for plinth artwork [BBC]
Gormley puts public on pedestal [BBC]

Untitled (mattress) (1991) by Rachel Whiteread, via The Museum of Modern Art

Brazilian Photographer Vik Muniz has curated an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art featuring approximately 80 works from the museum’s collection, including those by Eugène Atget, John Baldessari, Marcel Duchamp, Nan Goldin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pablo Picasso, Dieter Rams, and Rachel Whiteread. The exhibit is part of Artist’s Choice, a series of exhibitions where an artist becomes a curator using selected works from the Museum of Modern Art’s Collection.

Muniz often questions the traditions and symbolism of visual representation by contrasting unlikely materials to depict subjects in his photographs. In this exhibition he has similarly brought works together out of their normal museological classification, thus allowing the viewer to create their own visual interpretation of artworks based on various linkages and connections. For the show’s theme, he employs a rebus, a puzzle that uses carefully connected images and symbols to create a phrase or a sentence. Instead of forming a sentence, he organizes the artworks by linking them through similarities in material, subject matter, technique, and form.

Artist’s Choice: Rebus, Vik Muniz
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
through February 23, 2009
Exhibition Page: Artist’s Choice: Rebus, Vik Muniz
Press: ‘Art’s Choice + Muniz = Rebus’- Connecting the Dots at the Museum of Modern Art New York [New York Times]
Vik Muniz on Guest-Curating his MoMA Show, ‘Rebus’ [New York Mag]
Vik Muniz Creates Rebus, an Inventive Narrative of Works from MoMA’s Collection [ArtDaily]

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Place (Village) 2006-08, via New York Times

British artist Rachel Whiteread’s installation Place (Village) (2006-08) is currently on view for the first time in The United States at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  This recent work is the centerpiece of an exhibition simply titled Rachel Whiteread which also features a selection of the artist’s earlier pieces including casts of doors, the insides of boxes, and wood flooring, as well as drawings and collages.

Museum of Fine Arts Press Release for Rachel Whiteread
A Talk with Rachel Whiteread [Time]
Rachel Whiteread at MFA [Big Red & Shiny]
Rachel Whiteread – Hidden Corners of the Neighborhood [NYT]
Whiteread at MFA – It Takes a Village [HubArts]
Rachel Whiteread’s Dramatic Installation [ArtDaily]
Missed Oppurtunity at The MFA [Boston Globe]

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