Rachel Whiteread: on paper: with related sculpture

For decades, a label on the back of Rachel Whiteread's framed drawings has carried the instruction: 'It is Rachel Whiteread's express wish that none of her drawings should be exhibited alongside her sculptures.' This exhibition, curated in close collaboration with the artist, marks a significant departure from this longstanding practice — a rare invitation into the most guarded territory of her practice.

Many of the drawings presented here date from the 1990s and have never before been publicly shown, coming directly from Whiteread's studio. They vary widely in surface and texture — some glossy, others grainy, transparent or bold — and carry a physical presence as immediate as that of her sculptures.

Several works focus on floors observed independently of their original settings — black tiles, resin surfaces, interlocking parquet — including studies of the Berlin apartment where Whiteread lived between 1992 and 1993. Works such as Untitled (3 Hot Water Bottles) (1992) and Floor (1992) are made on graph paper using correction fluid as a mark-making material. The tension between the grid's regularity and the irregular, expressive line underscores the deeply subjective quality of these works, standing in marked contrast to the apparent objectivity of her casts.

In bringing drawings and sculptures together, the exhibition proposes that there is no hierarchy between the mediums. As curator Allegra Pesenti observes, 'the drawings are as sculptural as the sculptures are graphic.' The sculptures here do not function as endpoints to which the drawings are subordinate studies; rather, each illuminates the other, revealing a fluid dialogue that has always existed in Whiteread's practice, even as she has maintained their separation.

This is the first exhibition to revisit Whiteread's drawings in the fifteen years since the major retrospective Rachel Whiteread: Drawings which toured the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and Tate Britain, London in 2010–11.

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