Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrates 25 years of the artist’s work, bringing together her most familiar pieces of work alongside new art. Here is Love London Love Culture’s round up of the reviews…
The Guardian: ***** “Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture is both deadpan and affecting. It can be modest in scale and homely, grand and austere, mischievous, menacing.”
The Times: “A superb show reveals how the sculptor changed the way we view art.”
The Independent: *** “Many of the pieces are cast in resin of a variety of delicate hues, so we seem to be staring through them even as we look at them. They are already receding from us. Great work then? Significant work? Fairly significant. Also, a little dull, a little of playing the same trick over and over and over. Do they much move us? Occasionally.”
City Am: ***** “There’s a real tactility to this exhibition – you want to reach out and touch the plaster windows, walk on the resin floorboards, feel the warmth of the hot water bottles. In a world of loud contemporary art, this is a wonderful, essential change of pace and tone.”
The Telegraph: **** “This a strong and well-conceived show with enough powerful works to make it essential viewing. But it leaves you itching to see what would happen if Whiteread were to move in a genuinely new direction.”
Time Out: **** “Tate Britain hasn’t bothered with wall texts here, and the info handout’s pretty flimsy, so it’s left out some important emotional context as a result. The newer works aren’t that exciting either, nor are the works on paper.”
Evening Standard: ***** “The arrangement is an achievement in itself. Such variety of scale, shapes and colours could be jangling, but instead it is a great organisation of different accents.”
The Daily Mail: *** “Credit should go to the show’s curators, who’ve created an environment as much as an exhibition, and the gathering of so many off-white pieces (cast in plaster or concrete) gives off the vibe of tombs in a mausoleum.”
The Upcoming: **** ” Just outside are a series of works from the Tate’s collection chosen by Whiteread for their relevance to her art, and sitting proudly in the Duveen galleries is her stunning 1995 work Untitled (One Hundred Spaces). These examples put Whiteread in the context of British art and the development of contemporary sculpture, cementing the exhibition’s claim that Whiteread’s fame and media attention are well-deserved.”
The Arts Desk: “It reveals the exceptional beauty of everything Whiteread has produced and emphasises the uniformity of her vision.”
Victoria Sadler.com: “Its impact is not necessarily immediate but one that develops over time. ”
The Londonist: *** “Yet as visually striking as this all is, the show does bring to light that Whiteread makes casts, and that’s pretty much it.”
Rachel Whiteread’s exhibition is on display until the 21st January 2018. For more information and to book tickets visit: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/rachel-whiteread.