Rachel Whiteread: on paper: with related sculpture

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Rachel Whiteread alongside a small selection of related sculptures, marking a rare departure from the artist's longstanding practice of keeping these two mediums separate. For decades, a label on the back of the artist’s framed drawings has stated: ‘It is Rachel Whiteread’s express wish that none of her drawings should be exhibited alongside her sculptures’ – a directive that underscores the deeply personal nature of her works on paper, most of which reside in her studio archive.

Curated in close collaboration with Whiteread, this exhibition therefore represents a significant moment in understanding her practice and reveals the fluid relationship between mediums that has always existed in her work, even as she has maintained their physical and conceptual separation. There is no hierarchy between the mediums; rather, as Allegra Pesenti observes, ‘the drawings are as sculptural as the sculptures are graphic’.

Many of the drawings in this exhibition are dated from the 1990s, have never been publicly shown and come directly from the artist's studio. They range in surface and texture – glossy, grainy, transparent and bold – possessing a patina as tangible as that of her sculptures. Whiteread initially trained as a painter before shifting to sculpture, frustrated by the confines of the canvas. Drawing became the space where painting and sculpture could meet, allowing her to work with an intuitive sense of space and materiality that is sculptural in nature.

Many of the works in the exhibition are observations of floors shown independently of their original setting. Whiteread depicts black tiles, resin surfaces and interlocking structures, including the parquet floor from the Berlin apartment where she lived for a year between 1992 and 1993. Several drawings - such as Untitled (3 Hot Water Bottles) (1992) and Floor (1992) - are made on graph paper and use correction fluid as a mark-making material. The contrast between the grid of the graph paper and the irregular, expressive lines underscores the drawings’ subjective quality, standing in marked contrast to her casts.

In bringing these works together, the exhibition invites reconsideration of the boundaries between drawing and sculpture that artists from Matisse and Picasso to Richard Tuttle and Eva Hesse have explored. Here, the sculptures function not as finished works to which the drawings are subordinate studies, but as tools to illuminate the objectness and sculptural character of the drawings themselves. The result is a rare glimpse into Whiteread's guarded territory of thought –an invitation to her sanctuary, where the touch of the artist's hand is intimately revealed.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Allegra Pesenti, curator of ‘Rachel Whiteread: Drawings’, the major 2010-11 museum retrospective that toured the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nasher Sculpture Centre, Dallas; and Tate Braitin, London. The exhibition at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert is the first to revisit Whiteread’s drawings fifteen years after this landmark museum retrospective.

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