In this breakthrough sculpture, Whiteread cast the interior of a room in plaster. What we see is a very familiar environment from a point of view we have never experienced. A negative space, or void, has been transformed into a positive form, monumental and completely new, yet strangely familiar.
The room, in a Victorian town house, was cast in sections based on golden ratio proportions and then these sections were reassembled in the gallery space. This builds upon Modernist concepts of the everyday object being re-presented as art. The viewer now sees a very accurate representation of a space, but is denied access to it. The empty space that we live in has been solidified into a barrier. It literally makes us see things from a new perspective, including representational art.
In 1993, Whiteread extended these concepts in House, when she used concrete to cast the entire interior of a mid-terraced townhouse in London’s Mile End. The row of houses was then demolished, leaving the monument standing. This work is profound in both its formal and poetic content.
Things that are ordinary, a fireplace, a window, plaster coving, electrical fittings, become strange and surreal. Rooms where families have grown up and lived and passed on since the Victorian era are both publicly displayed and made inaccessible. We can no more enter those rooms than we can enter those lives. The house, like the people who lived there are gone. The sculpture itself is now gone. It survived for nearly one year until it too was subsequently demolished.
The work now only exists through documentary evidence, such as photographs and written articles, and in the memories of those who walked past it. The people who inhabited those spaces, so similar to the spaces we inhabit, only exist in memory or as concepts. Yet how strange the interior appears when stripped of its shell and viewed from the outside – this is a broad and poetic metaphor alluding to the human condition. Whiteread has taken the age-old problem of representing something through surface alone, and literally turned the notion inside out.
Article at the Washington National Gallery's website.
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