Saturday 7 April 2012

Rachel Whiteread - Ringmark (2010)

Rachel Whiteread (born 20 April 1963) is an English artist, best known for her sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She won the  Turner Prize in 1993—the first woman to win the prize. Whiteread is one of the Young British Artists, and exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997. She is probably best known for Ghost, a large plaster cast of the inside of a room in a Victorian house, and for her resin sculpture for the empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. Many of Whiteread's works are casts of ordinary domestic objects and, in numerous cases, the space the objects do not inhabit (often termed the "negative space") — instead producing a solid cast of where the space within a container would be; particular parts of rooms, the area underneath furniture, for example. She says the casts carry "the residue of years and years of use". Whiteread mainly focuses on the line and the form for her pieces.


Drawing is a critical part of Whiteread's practice, with the artist describing it as being like "a diary" of her work. Ringmark, a specially commissioned edition to coincide with Whiteread's drawing retrospective at Tate Britain, is laser-cut from very fine plywood and is based on an ink drawing of a circular-patterned floor. It was released by Counter Editions in an edition of 400, and consists of 0.8mm laser-cut stained-black plywood mounted on Heritage Conservation board, 61 x 53 cm, signed, numbered and dated on the mount by the artist.  The original price was £450 and it is currently retailing at £750.  Number 59/400 in a cream wood frame.