NEW YORK.- Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces, an exhibition of two new sculptures by British artist Rachel Whiteread, opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on March 8, 2002. The works, Untitled (Basement) (2001), and Untitled (Apartment) (2001), which were commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and exhibited there last fall, were cast from the artist's new home and studio. The two sculptures articulate the artist's preoccupation with architecture as a reflection of personal memory and history and as a means to address larger social forces. The exhibition will be on view through June 5, 2002. "We are extremely proud to present these monumental new works by Rachel Whiteread," noted director Thomas Krens. "Rachel is one of the most formidable sculptors of our time. Her unique approach to the discipline is clear in these pieces, which possess an intense physical presence and communicate a deep sense of humanity."



Over the last twenty years, Rachel Whiteread has transformed ordinary domestic objects and architectural spaces into poetic sculptures that explore the relationship between memory, architecture, and the body; and the private and public realm. In the late 1980s, Whiteread began making sculptures by casting household fixtures and furniture, including wardrobes, beds, sinks, and baths, to create pieces which emphasize the private aspects of domestic life and reflect the human body in symbolic terms. Using such industrial materials as plaster, concrete, rubber, and polystyrene, Whiteread typically casts the space underneath, around, or inside the objects, creating negative impressions of the items she works with. These forms record the shape and surface of the original objects in detail, but not their physical presence, often invoking in the viewer a sense of remembrance and feelings of absence and loss.

Over time, Whiteread expanded the scope of her program to include casts of larger architectonic spaces. In 1993, the artist created her first public sculpture, entitled House. The work, an off-white concrete cast of the interior spaces in a Victorian working-class home, appeared as a phantom of the original building and drew attention to the consequences of gentrification in East London occurring at the time. In October 2000, Whiteread unveiled the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, a commemoration to the 65,000 Austrian Jews who were killed during World War II. This monolithic project—an impenetrable, inside-out library—alludes to Nazi book burnings, and to the concept of the "people of the book."