Rachel Whiteread

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2002

London, Haunch of Venison, Rachel Whiteread, 2002

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the pink hues tend more towards bubble-gum pink in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a faint handling mark to the front of the top left corner of the top cast and some surface inconsistencies and very minor nicks in places which are inherent to the casting process and choice of material.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Suspended against gravity like fossilised city skylines, or eons-worn geological strata, the impressions and irregularities in the plaster surface of Untitled (Pink) from 2002 record the individual page marks, spine shapes, and paper colours of books. First exhibited in Whiteread's acclaimed 2002 show at Haunch of Venison, the present work continues the artist's defining project of concretising spaces and places whose dimensions are hidden, unnoticed, or doomed to destruction. Each element of the present work casts the negative space behind and above printed volumes upon a shelf, a ghostly record of absent words and thoughts. Similar bibliocentric examples from Whiteread’s oeuvre are now owned by the most prestigious public art museums: larger bookshelf installations are found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Fusing the intimate and domestic nature of Whiteread’s early work with the monumental and communal subjects that emerged in the 1990s, Untitled (Pink) offers a powerful summation of her artistic idiom and unique reinvention of the readymade.


The present work belongs to a group of library-related sculptures initiated in 1995 and continued through the early 2000s, the period around which Whiteread’s Vienna Holocaust Memorial design was selected, vigorously debated, and finally unveiled in 2000. Conceived as a site-specific response to the Judenplatz, the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, the memorial presents a square concrete cast of a library whose doors remain permanently sealed and whose books face inward. Whiteread’s monument acknowledged that, for The People of the Book, “the book epitomises heritage and endurance in the face of displacement and Diaspora; it is seen as a symbol of sanctuary for Jewish learning and for the continuance of tradition”, and alluded to historical instances of book burning by repressive and despotic forces (Andrea Schlieker, 'Pause for Thought: The Public Sculptures of Rachel Whiteread' in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Rachel Whiteread, 2001, p. 60-61). While bureaucratic processes and political disagreement delayed the construction of Whiteread’s memorial for several years, she explored the visual language of book repositories, making this theme a significant chapter of her output.


Untitled (Pink) follows from such iconic projects as House (1993), the controversial cast of a condemned Victorian terrace house in Hackney, for which Whiteread became the first woman to win the Turner Prize. On the continuity between the bookshelves and her earlier works, Whiteread has explained: “as one develops as an artist, the language becomes the language of the pieces you have made previously, building up a thesaurus, really. A lot of my work is influenced by earlier work, as well as the decrepit libraries of Hackney or the junk shops” (the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces, 2001-02, p. 140-41). As with House, casting the bookshelves involves violently destroying them, literally ripping the books from the hardened plaster, sometimes leaving fragments of paper lodged permanently into the surface. Depending on Whiteread’s intention, the plaster may also absorb colours from the book pages, as in Untitled (Pink) where rectangular bands of bled pink and yellow punctuate the white surface at intervals. Resembling Donald Judd’s minimalist wall installations, Whiteread’s sculptures nevertheless depart from the minimalist tradition in that their indexical nature haunts the spaces they inhabit. The voids along the shelves prompt the viewer to supply their own narratives and knowledge, begetting an active process of questioning: what has been taken away? Why? How might it have looked before?


Whereas other book-related works, such as Andreas Gursky’s contemporaneous and panoramic photograph of the Stockholm public library, often emphasise the entropic expanse of an immense and bewildering collection, Whiteread’s sculpture conveys a specific time and place. In Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story The Library of Babel, the narrator inhabits a universe consisting of books that together span every possible arrangement of words conceivable. Borges’ character is left to impossibly scour existing texts, searching for those with meaning. Addressing these same themes - of the power, vastness, and fragility of knowledge - Whiteread sets the observer on a search through their own spheres of reference and experience for answers. Succinctly expressing her iconic approach to the sculptural object, Untitled (Pink) presents an evocative meditation on the art object and the written word.