Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963 in Ilford, lives in London) already has two "first woman" credits to her name. In 1993, she was not only the first female but also the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Turner Prize, and at the 1997 Venice Biennale, she became the first woman to present a solo show at the British Pavilion, an exhibit that earned her Best Young Artist. She won these awards with her large-scale casts of the negative spaces of architectural and household objects. Her works on paper, more rarely shown in public, are no less relevant to her art practice. Whether as a cast in plaster, concrete or resin, or a print in ink on paper, Whiteread's interest remains the same. Speaking of her work, she explains: "I wanted to preserve the everyday, I wanted to give authority to some of the forgotten things." Repetition, memory and reduction are Whiteread's themes. Her works reveal the unnoticed and the forgotten. They show traces of surfaces and textures, and testify to presence and absence. In her work on paper Untitled, created this year, the blank spaces between the intersecting red and yellow rings form new surfaces. The varyingly wide rims of the circles create spatiality and suggest a sequence-even if the circles themselves leave it open as to what their counterpart is.