Rachel Whiteread  CBE (born 1963) is a British artist, best known for her sculptures, which typically take the form of casts, and first woman to win the Turner Prize. Whiteread is one of the so-called 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".

Rachel Whiteread's "Ghost" (1990) was famous before it got here. Over the weekend it went on view at the National Gallery of Art, which has just acquired it. "Ghost" is the ghost of a room. The room, which is the opposite of famous, is a parlour in a narrow rowhouse in a working-class street in the East End of London. "Ghost" is a cast of the empty space inside it. It's classical and august. The room isn't. It's unluxurious and little and sad.
The air in it -- air that Whiteread's plaster visually solidifies -- once would have smelled of mildew and damp wool and boiled cabbage, but not anymore. One odd thing about works of art is how much they can change after being made. The air in Whiteread's piece has been perfumed, most expensively perfumed.
Now it glitters with celebrity. "Ghost" is hot. For Whiteread's plaster has become, through no fault of her own, a signature piece of the "YBAs," the chic Young British Artists, and of London's soaring rise in the international art world, and of all that that implies. "Ghost" is meant to tug at memories, which it does, but those that come aren't only memories of working-class poverty in Bethnal Green. They are also recollections of the makers and shakers who make the art world shake -- its publicity masters, its interfering politicians, its connected dealers, billionaires. Remember Charles Saatchi, the fabulously successful adman whose campaign made Margaret Thatcher prime minister of Britain? "Ghost" was once his. Remember when Mayor Rudy Giuliani railed against the indecency of the "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum? How the New York tabloids loved it; "Ghost" was in that show. Remember the Turner Prize? In London that award for young artists is more controversial than the Academy Awards. "Ghost" helped Whiteread win it, at the age of 30, in 1993. And have you heard of Larry Gagosian? You should have. Gagosian is one of the art world's top dealers and top facilitators. He runs multiple architect-designed galleries in Manhattan and London and Beverly Hills. It was he who arranged "Ghost's" move across the Atlantic to the National Gallery of Art. Which cost a lot of money. No figure was announced, of course, but, given Whiteread's prices, "Ghost" surely cost in excess of $1 million.
The billionaire who came up with that money is a local one. Mitchell Rales is a Potomac resident, and a collector, and the head of the Danaher Corp. Last year Rales bought the gallery a great Picasso plaster, the 1909 "Head of Fernande." And it is Rales's Glenstone Foundation that gave "Ghost" to the museum as a "partial and promised" gift.

At 35, Rachel Whiteread is already a darling of the contemporary art world. Her castings of empty spaces, insides and undersides of commonplace objects, have earned her an international reputation. In 1993, she won the Turner Prize, irthe most prestigious award for contemporary art in Britain. In 1997, she received a commission from the New York City Public Art Fund to erect a sculpture in Soho, "Water Tower," an 11-foot high transparent resin casting of a water tower. Whiteread also won the commission to design the Vienna Holocaust Memorial. All of the major art magazines have run stories on her.

Whiteread's strong reputation is, however, not so striking as New York's overwhelming indifference to it throughout Sensation's BMA run. When the news-media have turned to the actual art in the exhibit, they have focused on aspects of violence, morbidity, death, and sexuality, which are, to be fair, not only crucial parts of the exhibit, but are the aspects that the BMA emphasized in its advertisement of the show. However, one must examine why New York, across the board, has highlighted these aspects to the exclusion of a discussion of the issues in the other artworks. The answer of course lies in the current nature of American society, which is clearly obsessed with sex and violence. Our culture alternates between being drawn to such images and condemning them. It follows that these are the subjects that would be singled out from Sensation, both by the BMA and by the New York public. Whiteread's artistic sensibility, one of tranquility and subtlety, has garnered her far less attention than has the shock sensibility done for other artists in the show, such as Damien Hirst or the Chapman brothers.
House, perhaps her best known work, was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in autumn 1993, exhibited at the location of the original house — 193 Grove Road — in East London (all the houses in the street had earlier been knocked down by the council)

As a teenager - perhaps in rebellion against her mother - she showed no interest in art and put herself down for science A levels. But at the very last minute she switched to art and found herself 'incredibly thirsty for it'. She discovered her trademark technique - casting - when she was still at Brighton Art School and has stuck to it ever since. But at the beginning she tended to cast highly personal things - a dressing table from home, the space underneath her bed, the inside of her childhood wardrobe. She sees this as a strain of nostalgia or sentimentality running through all her early work up to and including House . She also had a strong interest in death, most obviously manifested in her enthusiasm for casting mortuary slabs. She says that as a teenager she was obsessed with death, because she had three or four friends who died, and also she was aware that her father's bad heart meant he could die at any moment - and indeed he did die in 1989 just when her career was taking off. Charles Saatchi bought Ghost. Whiteread was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1991, and became the first woman to win it two years later. It was then that the art world - "a carnival with a casino attached", as somebody once described it - came slowly seeping, and then rushing in. 1993 was also the year of House, a project with serious political and social overtones that nevertheless saw her catapulted out of the arts ghetto and into the maw of the tabloids, an arena where Damien Hirst and his more frolicsome contemporaries were already at play.

The Holocaust Memorial was a draining experience. It was a political and bureaucratic minefield, and took five years to achieve. At the same time, the 13-tonne sculpture that she had been commissioned to make for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, the plinth itself inverted and cast in Perspex, was being dogged by what seemed like insurmountable technical problems, and she was constantly flying around the world repairing pieces and installing shows. When she moved house, she made the decision to step away from her role as hands-off executive "producer" of large public sculptures and to go back to her original, solitary studio practice. "I was feeling, not that my touch had necessarily gone, but it was all a bit out of control and I just wanted to go back into the studio. I think I wanted this studio to be my studio, rather than me and my assistants. I didn't want all the chaos of the last place. It was mine, and I wanted it to be mine; and to do that, I had to physically make the work in it, and so it was a case of trying to work out what that was."

As one of Britain's leading contemporary sculptors, Whiteread has undertaken several public commissions. She was awarded the Turner Prize in 1993 for House and, more recently, has completed the Holocaust memorial in Vienna and Monument which was displayed on Trafalgar Square’s empty plinth.

For the Turbine Hall, she has created a gigantic labyrinth-like structure, entitled Embankment, made from 14,000 casts of the inside of different boxes, stacked to occupy this monumental space. The form of a cardboard box has been chosen because of its associations with the storage of intimate personal items and to invoke the sense of mystery surrounding ideas of what a sealed box might contain.

Like her friend and early champion Damien Hirst, Whiteread has colossal, near impossible, visions. And somehow - through sheer energy for the most part - they get realised. "I'd just like to have a day off," says the indefatigable creator of Monument, "to have some sleep. We're all just exhausted."

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Rachel Whiteread Water bottle painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

Rachel Whiteread Cellar Painting Sale on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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Renting Out Your Property at Home and Abroad

Make life easy.

1. Make life easy, if buying an overseas property for letting, choose square or rectangular shaped rooms. Irregular or unusual shaped rooms make a room look smaller and cluttered. A key selling point for tenants is an en-suite and a decent sized living room is important even if the bedrooms are a bit on the small size.

Choose the right overseas letting agent.

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Interior design is important.

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Parking.

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Too many overseas investor owners may reduce your rental returns.

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Be involved with your management company.

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Internet Marketing.

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Keep in regular contact with your overseas agent.

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Don’t be greedy.

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Make sure the rent is paid on time!

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