Sheds Get Sexy as Artist Whiteread Obsesses at Gagosian

Mike Bruce/Rachel Whiteread/Gate Studios/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

"Detached 3" (2012), a work in concrete and steel by Rachel Whiteread. The artist's series is titled "Abject Objects."

Rachel Whiteread hasnt moved on in two decades. For Detached, her exhibition of sculpture at the Gagosian Gallery in London, she is doing exactly the same thing as when she first came to fame with House in 1993. She is still making casts of the internal space of structures.

House was a molding in concrete of the inside of an ordinary 19th-century dwelling. The centerpiece of the new show is made up of three casts of the interiors of garden sheds. This isnt so much a sign of lack of inspiration as a return to form.

It might sound like a criticism to say that an artist has not developed. Thats not necessarily so. Some artists innovate dynamically throughout their careers; you might call that the Picasso model. Others carry on doing the same thing, and -- so long as they carry on doing it well -- thats no disgrace.

The point of Whitereads work is that she is simultaneously a minimalist and a realist. The three concrete casts of sheds are placed in the middle of the main gallery at Gagosian very much as if they were big abstract sculptures by, say, Richard Serra or Donald Judd.

They have much the same chunky presence as works by those two artists. Whitereads work is not abstract. Go up close, and you find a meticulous record of the surface of ordinary things: wood grain, door fittings, the covering of the roof.

One of the traditional functions of art is to represent ordinary objects in a way that makes them seem beautiful and/or interesting. Suddenly sheds arent just boringly mundane.

Whiteread was one of the younger artists of the 1990s for whom the late Lucian Freud had most time. When you think about it, you can see why. He too spent a great deal of time reproducing such things as floorboards, doors and window frames. For that matter, Velasquez devoted a lot of effort to depicting a water pitcher, Caravaggio a peeling wall.

Whiteread isnt a painter but that quite unusual thing, a still-life sculptor. The challenge for an artist who makes pictures is to collapse the three dimensions of the world onto a flat surface. For a sculptor, the fundamental problem is to make an object that will be different enough from all the other 3D stuff in the world to seem interesting and maybe beautiful.

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Sheds Get Sexy as Artist Whiteread Obsesses at Gagosian