Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights

The Guardian

4 days ago

I feel like I've stumbled into a 1970s album cover for the Who or Led Zeppelin that juxtaposes nature and post-industrial malaise. Emerging from woodlands on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, you see a massive concrete cast of a staircase in a lush green field – a spectacular, surreal collision of urban grit and English pastoral. This is Rachel Whiteread's Down and Up, a brutal intruder in the landscape.
Leafy woods and glorious views – I contemplated Down and Up through a veil of rain but was assured you can see down to the sea on a sunny day – create a dramatic setting for her stark sepulchres. In a forest clearing stands another work, Untitled (Pair) – two bone-white rectangular slabs that look like death. That's no accident, for their shallow concave tops were cast from mortuary tables. Alone with this monument, the tall trees standing guard around me, I don't so much ponder mortality as silently scream.
House, the famous, lost masterpiece that won Whiteread the 1993 Turner prize, also once stood in the open air, as ungainly and insistent against an east London sky as these remorseless objects look in a much more tranquil context. It was demolished in a culture war that's forgotten now, but Whiteread is no sensationalist. Her art hits you for a moment with harsh modernism, but then – unless you refuse to look and feel, as the local council did – its sombre poetry creeps up on you.
Down and Up is cast from an old staircase in a synagogue in Bethnal Green, east London. You can see why these stairs fascinate her: they are curiously narrow and sloped, as if pushed out of shape by multitudes of long-gone feet. Odd, baffling details like this give her art warmth and passion, while the blank masses of cast material, in this case grey concrete, fill it with silence and terror. You can't care about life, her art suggests, without recognising death. She sees ghosts everywhere.
Her exhibition launches the Goodwood Art Foundation. In its low-slung, partly glass-walled gallery, Whiteread's eye for decay and loss infects a new series of brightly coloured but emotionally serious photographs. Wherever she goes, in Essex or Italy, Whiteread in these pictures sees the crack in the teacup, the rusty stain on the mosaic floor. She notices bin bags like shrouds, a rotting community centre that refuses to be picturesque.
Sometimes their foreboding is a bit false, even descending into bathos. We can all be spooked by crows gathering on a telephone wire and sometimes an abandoned child's toy is just that, however wretched it looks on the doorstep.
Yet this is how Whiteread's imagination works: she sees a continuum between everyday melancholia and collective grief. In 2023, she had a show in Bergamo, Italy – which was severely hit by Covid – creating tombstone-like sculptures to mourn the lost. Some are here. Based on casts of the spaces under chairs – a favourite Whiteread motif – they are marked by recesses where legs and struts once were.
She aspires to public monuments yet also flees into secret recesses of introspection and memory – which is why a pastoral landscape is such a resonant setting for her art. Two photographs in the gallery show rotting, abandoned places, a shed and a caravan, in each of which someone seems to have lived a hermitic existence, but these shelters rust and rot away, surrendering to weeds. In front of them she recreates this spectacle of solitude and dissolution in her sculpture Doppelgänger, a reconstruction of a smashed, forgotten shack, its broken walls pierced by fallen branches, painted in white emulsion, a ghostly covering that with brilliant simplicity makes reality metamorphosise into art.
Outside in the woods, at the end of a long, narrow vista, she has placed a concrete cast of a sealed shed, its windows opaque, its door closed for ever. You feel more and more alone walking around it, trying to find the way in. It is called Detached II. This is a poem to solitude and here in the garden, surrounded by unruly spring growth, it feels as eccentric and lost as the rotting caravan and shack in her photographs. Dissolution and decay are part of nature. They are also part of our lives and time's arrow only points one way. Thoughts like these are not consoling but they feel as if they belong in the woods, like intoxicating mushrooms of melancholy.
Whiteread is a great modern artist and her sculptures blight this pastoral, beautifully.
Rachel Whiteread's exhibition is at Goodwood Art Foundation from 31 May to 2 November