RACHEL WHITEREAD at the TATE BRITAIN and IMPRESSIONISTS IN LONDON
RACHEL WHITEREAD at the TATE BRITAIN Objects shaped like mattresses, hot water bottles, doors seeming to be doors of perception, windows, stacks or piles. The piles could be bollards or person traps like those found in school playgrounds, children squeezed somehow in between. Rachel Whiteread (born 1963) was the first female winner of the Turner Prize (1993) and this is a major retrospective of her work. Some of Whiteread’s smalls resemble objects from a Lush shop, translucent, multi-coloured toilet rolls lacking a sense of irony, perhaps. Some of the materials used are intriguing such as rubber, wax, plastic, polyurethane and many of the objects demand to be touched even if this tactile sense is denied to us, seeming to be like missing spots on leopards. A dimension is subtly absent but arbitrary bleeps emitted by sensors seek to make up for it, their source is unknown but their presence is palpable. Whiteread’s work imitates the everyday, unlike the work of Eva Hesse (1936