Latest news with #RachelWhiteread
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
At Goodwood, Rachel Whiteread Is Redefining Sculpture Parks
Rachel Whiteread is used to her work provoking strong reactions. The 62-year-old artist won the Turner Prize in 1993 for her landmark sculpture,'House', a plaster cast of the inside of a Victorian terraced house in east London. Less than four months later, despite a public campaign to save it, it was torn down by Tower Hamlets Council. In 1996, her plans for a Holocaust memorial in Judenplatz, Vienna — a room constructed from casts of shelves lined with books, their spines turned inwards — created a political furore. On that one, sense prevailed, and it still stands. This summer, Whiteread, who was made a dame in 2019, will be the inaugural artist to have a solo show at Goodwood Art Foundation, a new sculpture park and gallery on the grounds of the Goodwood Estate in Sussex. Already, she has met with some local opposition. 'You make a decision about where something's going, and then suddenly a badger's moved in, or there's a squirrel in the way,' she says, sitting in her airy studio in Camden, north London, close to where she lives with her husband, the artist Marcus Taylor, with whom she has two sons. 'So there's been a bit of that going on,' she continues, 'but, having an enormous respect for nature, that's quite all right.' For an artist who's often associated with urban settings, Whiteread, who has clouds of soft curls and a friendly but no-nonsense manner, does have an unexpected interest in the bucolic. She was born in Ilford and went to school in London, then Brighton University and the Slade, but growing up she and her sisters were 'dragged all over the country' by her artist mother and geographer father. The idea of interacting with natural landscapes is 'definitely in me from my family', she says, and over the years she has produced a number of what she calls 'shy sculptures' — tucked-away installations that you might journey to, or happen upon: a cast of a boathouse on a Norwegian fjord; another of a wooden house in Kunisaki, Japan; the concrete ghost of a cabin on Governors Island in New York. At Goodwood Art Foundation, within grounds recently spruced up by garden designer extraordinaire Dan Pearson, she'll be exhibiting existing pieces including 'Detached II (2012)", a cast of a garden shed, and "Untitled (Pair) (1999)', twin tomb-like sculptures based on mortuary slabs, alongside a new work, 'Down and Up (2024-2025)', cast from the staircase of the former synagogue in which she and Taylor and the boys used to live in London's East End. 'When I made 'House', one of the things that really frustrated me was that I didn't really cast the staircase,' she says. 'I had to cut it away and cast around it, so the wooden part of the staircase was always left. It's hard to cast a staircase generally, because people are using it, but when we moved to Shoreditch there were two or three staircases in the building, so I cast them.' In the Goodwood Art Foundation's new indoor space, the Pavilion Gallery, she'll be showing photographs, too; she's always taken pictures, using them as a kind of sketchbook, but has shown them in public only rarely. Grouped in threes, they capture haphazard, quasi-sculptural compositions that have caught her eye: a flattened traffic cone; an unusual storm drain; a ring of oxidation on a tiled floor. They're intriguing, and often quietly absurd. Whiteread pulls out a photograph of a black rubbish bag that she spotted recently, strung up on the iron railings of a London townhouse. There's a small rip at the bottom, through which is visible a pair of perfect eggs. 'And there was not a single crack in them!' she says, delighted. When we meet, she's still a few weeks from installing the new show — which, as you might imagine, involves some serious haulage vehicles and some very big boxes — but the plan for it is very much in place: 'We're in the end game,' she says. Whiteread has, in the two-and-a-half year run-up, been able to enjoy some of Goodwood's other offerings, including its annual motoring event, Goodwood Festival of Speed, which, she says, was, 'very noisy, very smelly, but it was definitely interesting to sit in the VIP enclosure where the cars do those — whatever they do — weird turns in front of you. And the boys got to sit in these vintage F1 cars. It was good fun.' She says she has been warmly welcomed by Goodwood's owner, the Duke of Richmond ('very, very nice, and so is his wife, and actually the Duke's a very good photographer'), though rural idylls are not, apparently, Whiteread's spiritual home. She has a place in Wales that she's soon going to visit and 'de-mouse', but eventually the city always calls her back. 'I love the countryside, but after a while I'm banging my head against a tree — I need some grot!' Other cities are summoning her, too: in the next couple of years she'll have a show in Brussels, and will be installing pieces in Switzerland and Japan. 'I've been fairly consistent,' she says of her working life. 'I'm really very lucky to be able to do what I like doing.' Her oeuvre now involves photography, cast sculptures and also sculptures that are not cast: one of the indoor works at Goodwood Art Foundation will be a constructed piece, 'Doppelganger (2020-2021)', that has been built to look like a white shed being ripped apart. 'The older I've got, the more vocabulary I've got to use, so I'm just playing with that.' Whiteread's work, whatever form it takes, deals with memory, residue, decay and the inexorable passing of time. And it speaks to us. 'People get very moved by things I've made,' she says, matter-of-factly. It's a phenomenon that she finds rewarding. 'If it helps shape people's lives, or helps people deal with something, or think about something, that's a gift I can give. I'm not trying to trigger people, but I know that the work is personal and has a sensitivity to it, and generally these things move people, don't they?' The badgers, however, are staying put. Rachel Whiteread is at Goodwood Art Foundation, Chichester, from 31 May to 2 November; You Might Also Like The Best Men's Sunglasses For Summer '19 There's A Smartwatch For Every Sort Of Guy What You Should Buy For Your Groomsmen (And What They Really Want)
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rachel Whiteread hits the countryside, Derby's great hero and museums reinvented – the week in art
Rachel WhitereadThe Sussex countryside is haunted by grey concrete ghosts and white mortuary slabs as Whiteread proves her vision is as melancholically powerful as ever. Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex, 31 May to 2 November V&A East Storehouse This enjoyable, utopian and generous reinvention of what a museum can be is an unmissable experience. Opens 31 May, admission free Hamad Butt: ApprehensionsOverdue retrospective of an artist who died young but left a body of uncanny, highly imaginative works. Whitechapel Art Gallery, from 4 June to 7 September Glenn Brown and Matthew Weir: The Sight of SomethingPaintings and drawings that drip with dream-like memories and peculiar fantasies fit for Freud's Museum, London, from 4 June to 19 October Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II Sprawling, chaotic installation that looks like the aftermath of a hurricane. South London Gallery, until 7 September The Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh took a month-long road trip around the UK in a minivan, resulting in The Necessity of Seeing, 22 images that explore identity, gender and conflict. 'It was like getting a crash course in UK history and contemporary life,' she says. Read about the project and see more of her pictures in our interview with her Lauded photographer Sebastião Salgado died at 81 Australian women played a vital role in forging international modernism William Morris played a blinder with his football kit designs Two Somerset villages hosted a bite-sized biennale with global reach Black artist Tomashi Jackson explores how colour theory echoes discussions of race Bob King's theatre posters have helped turn shows into global hits The Goodwood Art Foundation's opening exhibition is a winning choice Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Cartoonist, illustrator, playwright and detective novelist Barry Fantoni has died Banksy posted a new lighthouse work thought to be in Marseille Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523 The theologian and classical scholar Erasmus, the most famous and influential thinker of the north European Renaissance, poses in his study with a gentle almost-smile. Holbein paints him, not as an idealised or formal figure, but with an immediacy that makes you feel Erasmus is right there, patiently keeping his head in the position the painter requires, tolerantly spending this time being depicted. It has the same sense of an actual encounter between artist and sitter that you get in Holbein's portrait drawings, especially his intimate studies of Thomas More and his family. That is no coincidence. Holbein knew Erasmus personally, not just professionally, when they both lived in Basel. When Holbein wanted to go to England, Erasmus wrote a letter of introduction to his friend More, who commissioned a family portrait on his recommendation. Holbein is often seen as a simple portraitist but this painting reveals him as part of an intellectual circle, mixing with More and Erasmus and influenced by their warm, witty humanism. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Goodwood Art Foundation: Rachel Whiteread proves simplicity is best
Few things at Goodwood are muted. On this 12,000-acre estate, crowned by that sprawling country house, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon hosts shooting parties, a high-speed hillclimb and a classic-car festival. But seek out, in a corner of his domain, the new Art Foundation, which opens this weekend, and you'll be met by serenity. Glad of it, as well: the selection of contemporary art on display – 14 works, or groups thereof – thrives in these 70 acres of ancient trees and winding paths. The Foundation has two small galleries; a third is in the works. In the larger space is the inaugural headline act: Rachel Whiteread, represented indoors by two sculptural installations and, rare thing, a selection of photographs. Few British artists make work as consistently high-calibre. Whiteread's ability to give form and shape to the traces we leave behind, the absences that build our worlds, hasn't palled since she won the Turner Prize with House in 1993. In the Gallery, she presents Doppelgänger (2020-1), a shed assembled from found materials then painted a uniform white; and Bergamo III (2023), materialisations of the space beneath chairs and stools, cut from north-Italian stone. These pieces hint at struggle and loss – the latter in particular, given Bergamo's experience in the Covid-19 pandemic – but their meaning remains, in Whiteread's familiar way, so beautifully elusive: not quite romantic, not quite sad. Occasionally, she verges on funny. Of all the works at Goodwood, the Instagram star will be one of her outdoor offerings, Down and Up (2024-5), a pair of staircases heading to nowhere, placed at a meadow's edge. The leading role may be Whiteread's, but look for two gems by Veronica Ryan: a pair of bronzes, which give us magnolias in one case as a pod, and in the other as heads in bloom. The subtlety of the metalwork, the fineness of the hues: Ryan's craftsmanship stops you dead. Most of the pieces you encounter here are of comparable quality. That said, small exhibitions expose any weaknesses, and Goodwood has a few. Rose Wylie's pineapple-like sculptures try to be bobbled and daffy while also retaining an edge – exotic fruit means colonial imports; one looks a bit like a bomb – but they don't get the balance right. Isamu Noguchi's geometric stack isn't one of his more interesting works. Still, as at Yorkshire Sculpture Park or Hauser & Wirth's Somerset branch, it's a pleasure not to be jammed in a heaving urban gallery: to wander down woodchip walks and quiet glades, and see art in the open air. Best of all, you don't need a smartphone: just pick up a handsome printed map, less a leaflet than a brochure. (Or even do without one, although the sign by each work omits to name its materials, which most people like to know.) You could call some of these pieces, undemonstrative forms in a natural setting, straightforward – even 'simple', as the Foundation calls its grounds. If so, fine: simplicity can be rich. Whiteread's art is proof of that.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights
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
Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Rachel Whiteread — ‘A home for old YBAs? There'd be great art and big egos'
I'm walking through woodland on a clear spring day and as the trees give way to a wildflower meadow, a staircase rises from the earth into a bright blue sky. Next to it is another identical set of stairs, inverted and heading downwards to form a V-shape with its companion. The sculpture is intentionally disorientating like an Escher print in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. It is one of several works by Rachel Whiteread in the grounds of Goodwood House on the Sussex Downs, installed as part of a new sculpture park that opens at the end of this month. Like much of Whiteread's work, the staircase exudes a ghostly presence. It was cast from the space underneath the stairs in
