Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase; Photo: Mike Bruce © Rachel Whiteread; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, and Gagosian Gallery.
Rachel Whiteread, “Detached III”, (2012)
It seems many people cannot wait for 2016 to make its exit fast enough. Here's another reason to look forward to 2017: the Saint Louis Art Museum has just acquired British artist Rachel Whiteread's "Detached III" (above), and will install it in its Grace Broughton Sculpture Garden this spring.
Whiteread, who was part of the Young British Artists movement along with Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, has a retrospective opening at Tate Britain next year; she is best known for House, a life-sized cast of the interior of a condemned Victorian home in east London. That work won her the Turner Prize at the young age of 30—she was also the first woman to receive that honor. House embodies all of the qualities that Whiteread is known for—sculptures that look stripped-down and Minimalist from a distance, but that open up with a myriad of warm, organic details upon closer inspection. "Detached III" is part of a series of sculptures, cast from liquid concrete, that capture the space within garden sheds. (Whiteread says, rather poetically, the process is "mummifying the air.") Whiteread's sculpture, SLAM says, is meant to complement the trees and plants in the sculpture garden as well as David Chipperfield's 2013 museum expansion.
“Detached III complements the museum’s strong holdings of minimalist sculpture, including masterworks by Donald Judd and Richard Serra, as well as its collection of outdoor sculpture by British artists, including Anthony Caro, Andy Goldsworthy and Henry Moore,” SLAM director Brent Benjamin said via press release. (The release also notes that Whiteread's piece is the first in the garden made by a woman artist—a trend we hope will continue.)
Whiteread's other notable works include the poignant Holocaust memorial at the Judenplatz in Vienna (known as the Nameless Library); this year she also made the New York Times' best in architecture list for Cabin, a sculpture installed on New York's Governors Island. So: truly exciting news to see her work added to the growing, new(ish) sculpture garden taking shape on SLAM's grounds.
