Rachel Whiteread

"Untitled (Paperbacks)" by Rachel Whiteread, room installation, containing plaster and steel, gift of Agnes Gund; Thomas W. Weisel, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Frances R. Dittmer, John Kaldor, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, and Leon Black funds, and an anonymous fund, 1997

Rachel Whiteread turns, she maintained, to "the notion of interiority…of the literal inversion of space, to dig into the pool of memory and collective history. Her casts in plaster, wax, rubber, resin, or concrete, which range from domestic objects to full-scale rooms…, convey a sense of history even as they signal human absence. Untitled (Paperbacks), 1997, [shown above]…, is the negative cast of a walk-in library, where row upon row of paperbacks, shelved spine inward, double as a mnemonic field."