Rachel Whiteread: Substitute

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures and recent photographs by Rachel Whiteread at its Davies Street gallery, opening on March 26. The exhibition title, Substitute , resonates with the artist’s use of one medium to echo another, and to the way in which her casting process replaces negative space with physical substance. Substitute features large, wall-mounted sculptural reliefs produced by pressing papier-mâché pulp onto timeworn wooden barn doors and sections of gates, then covering the resultant forms in pigmented silver and copper leaf. In contrast to these opaque metallic surfaces are two transparent resin casts of sash windows in blue and pink hues. In her sculptural practice, Whiteread often uses standard industrial substances such as concrete, resin, and rubber, as well as more traditional materials like plaster and bronze, to produce cast objects with significatory presence that evoke absence, memory, and loss. Building on a foundation of Minimalist aesthetics, she focuses on the tangible surfaces of life, revealing lingering markers of age and use while drawing attention to negative space.