Rachel Whiteread. Alicia Chillida

Rachel Whiteread (London, 1963), winner of the Turner Price in 1993, is considered a key figure in contemporary British sculpture. The retrospective exhibition presents, for the first time in Spain, some 25 works from Europe and America, which offer a global idea of Whiteread's work.

Whiteread's sculptures are based on a series of confrontations: public/private, solid/ephemeral, copy/original. Her work is an attempt to allow these differences to play and relate to each other, in no way an attempt to resolve them. Stuart Morgan defines the artist's work in the catalog as follows: "The lively dialogue that originates between one piece and another, as well as the constant process of her vocabulary and of questioning the meaning of her sculpture, are characteristics of her work, mundane and reflective in equal measure".

What is essential in Whiteread's work, and this is evident in the exhibition, is the emptying. But as Batomeu Marí says, Whiteread does not empty the objects but the space they occupy, "the space inside them or the space they leave behind as a trace; everything in which matter replaces emptiness". The sculptures made by the artist, cast in plaster, concrete, resin or rubber, have different characteristics and sizes. The motifs used range from the emptying of the spaces occupied by everyday objects to the attempt to capture the invisible in architecture.

A house, a floor, a bathtub, a sink, a bed, a mattress become the basis for a set of mental mechanisms that can be defined as "rematerialization," through emptying. When Whiteread empties familiar spaces, a bathtub or the space under a bed - a favorite subject of children who seem compelled to re-enact over and over again the myth of their entry into the world - there is a strong sense of interrelation between the separate sculptures, as well as a physical vocabulary: hiding, protecting, lying... a constant relationship with the human body.

The exhibition produced by MNCARS for the Palacio de Velázquez, examines through a total of 22 works these relationships in the course of viewing the different series of Whiteread's work since 1988.

The installation is centered on two major pieces by the artist. From the entrance of the Palace, the spectator is confronted with One Hundred Spaces, (One hundred spaces), 1995, a work consisting of 100 resin blocks distributed in a rectangular space. Ghost (Spectrum), 1990; in it the plaster mass, once extracted from its matrix, reconstructs, in negative, all the elements of the interior surface of the room with the protuberances and irregularities that are revealed on the visible surface of the object. Both One Hundred Spaces like Ghost are crucial works in Rachel Whiteread's production in her relationship with domesticity and architecture.

A group of documentary works is exhibited in three spaces that include photographs and videos about the public project he carried out in 1993, House, (House): the vicissitudes of the gutting of a Victorian-style house in London, the subsequent demolition and the debates that arose around the project are amply documented in the rooms.