FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Rachel Whiteread

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture by Rachel Whiteread, from May 7 to June 18, 1996.  This solo exhibition brings five major new works to New York, offering a long-awaited examination of this important British artist’s work.

Rachel Whiteread has realized these sculptures over the course of the past year, continuing her exploration of spaces and objects by filling or surrounding them with plaster, rubber, or resin casts.  Whiteread’s choice of subjects:  beds, bathtubs, living spaces, and mortuary slabs, has demonstrated an ongoing physical interrogation of the body’s rituals of life and death.  While continuing this process, one piece in this exhibition testifies to an important new direction in her work.  With Untitled (Eight Shelves), Whiteread confronts her records of physical histories of the body with a new recording of cultural history in the form of plaster casts of bookshelves.  This work may be seen as a distillation of the concepts present in Whiteread’s recently commissioned Holocaust memorial in Vienna.  This monumental concrete cast of a library room acts a literal testament to the history lost with the extermination of Austrian Jews during the Holocaust, and as a reminder of that history which must continue to be taught and learned.

The Judenplatz Holocaust memorial will be inaugurated this November in Vienna.  Rachel Whiteread has added this major award to a long list of international distinctions, from the Turner Prize in 1993, to recent and upcoming solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (1994), the ICA Boston and Philadelphia (1995), the Reina Sofia (1996), and the Tate Gallery (1997/98).  Her work is housed in museum and private collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Tate Gallery, London, and the Saatchi Collection, London.

For further information, please contact Rachel Knecht at (212) 219-9600.