Rachel Whiteread:Drawings

Also at Tate Britain was a small exhibition of drawings by Rachel Whiteread. Whiteread's sculptures are some of my favourite contemporary works, subtle, even in large scale, and deeply poignant.

This exhibition was interesting as a means of revealing Whiteread's work in practice, showing initial ideas through to detailed plans for a range of work, from the late 1980s to the present. They reveal themes of domesticity, memory and loss, and of the idea of empty space. Rather than technical, detailed studies the drawings shown concentrate on revealing her creative inspirations and mapping out of these into ideas and plans.

I arrived in London too late to see Whiteread's 1993 work House and it was fascinating to see studies from 1991 and 1992 showing ideas for this work, in which she cast an entire Victorian terraced house in East London that had been marked for demolition. I was struck too by some of her postcard studies shown, in which she perforates spaces within architectural vistas with punched holes of various sizes, emphasising the open spaces.

For anyone who likes Whiteread's works this is a worthy journey to explore her work in more depth and understanding.