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21/5/2010

Rachel Whiteread

The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

The Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to present the first museum retrospective of drawings by contemporary British artist Rachel Whiteread. Featuring over 125 drawings and collages selected from the artist’s studio, as well as from leading public and private collections in Europe and the United States, the exhibition brings to the fore a rarely seen aspect of Whiteread’s work.

"We are pleased to welcome Rachel Whiteread to the Nasher Sculpture Center. This will be the first major exhibition at the Nasher of an artist not represented in our collection," said Director Jeremy Strick. "Ms. Whiteread is one of the most significant artists of our time, and this exhibition reveals a little-known but exceptionally beautiful aspect of her work."

While her sculpture is well known and widely published, Whiteread's work on paper has remained largely behind the scenes. "My drawings are a diary of my work," she explains, and like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections. Variegated textures, subtle nuances of tone over colored graph paper, and the play of imagery in collaged constructions are some of the distinctive characteristics of Whiteread's works on paper. A crucial aspect of her artistic practice, they are produced independently of the sculpture yet evoke similarly poignant notions of presence and absence.

In this exhibition, Whiteread's drawings will be accompanied by key examples of her sculptural work. While her drawings are of a more intimate nature than the sculptures, they share a similar patina that is alternatively glossy, grainy, mottled, slippery, transparent, fragile, and bold. Whiteread uses thick glazes of correction fluid and acrylic, which often causes the paper to undulate and turns the drawings into three-dimensional objects. Whiteread’s sculptures capture the traces of other people’s lives, while the traces of her own hand are reserved for her drawings. She seizes memories in all her work, but in the drawings those captured moments are her own: "With each drawing, I have an ability to recall where I did that drawing and the circumstance of its making," she specifies. "It is as if the drawing absorbed the time of its making."

Among the special features of the installation is a vitrine of objects selected by Whiteread. Works by the artist are juxtaposed with items gathered from various sources, such as attics and thrift stores, or found on walks and travels. Fossils, a dental mold, a tin votive, buttons and shoe lasts are just some of the objects that belong to Whiteread's collection of captured memories, and thus to her extended notion of drawing.

Rachel Whiteread Drawings comes to the Nasher Sculpture Center from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and will travel on to Tate Britain. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 224-page catalogue with essays by exhibition curator Allegra Pesenti and Ann Gallagher, Head of Collections (British Art) at the Tate. The catalogue is published by the Hammer Museum and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing.

Rachel Whiteread Drawings was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. This exhibition is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by Gail and Stanley Hollander, the Southern California Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Henry Moore Foundation, the British Council, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. The catalogue is made possible, in part, by the Contemporary Collectors - Orange County.

About the Nasher Sculpture Center;
Open since October 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is dedicated to the display and study of modern and contemporary sculpture. The Center is located on a 2.4-acre site in the heart of the Dallas Arts District. Renzo Piano, a world-renowned architect and winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1998, is the architect of the Center’s 55,000-square-foot building. Piano worked in collaboration with landscape architect Peter Walker on the design of the two-acre sculpture garden.

The Nasher Sculpture Center was the longtime dream of the late Raymond and Patsy Nasher, who together formed one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world. The Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection includes masterpieces by Calder, de Kooning, di Suvero, Giacometti, Hepworth, Kelly, Matisse, Miró, Moore, Picasso, Rodin, and Serra, among others, and continues to grow and evolve.

Image: Ceiling, 1993. Ink and correction fluid on graph paper 15 x 11 inches (38 x 28 cm). Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

For more information and photos, please contact:
Kristen Mills Gibbins Associate Director of Media Relations Nasher Sculpture Center
214.242.5177 KGibbins@NasherSculptureCenter.org

Opening Day Celebration Saturday, May 22 11 am – 5 pm

The Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street Dallas, TX 75201
Open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm and until 11 pm for special events.
General Admission to the Center is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students, and free for members and children 12 and under.

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