Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
These alarming, engrossing works take the artist’s seminal House and add horror, reflecting the turbulence of lives upended and exploded by the pandemic
I bet plenty of us have grappled with metaphorical ghosts in the loneliness and unease of lockdown, with all that uncomfortable time to think. But Rachel Whiteread has quite literally been coming to terms with her Ghost. In 1990, she showed a sculpture of that name at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. It was bought by Charles Saatchi and became an icon of a new kind of British art. A plaster cast of a room in a ordinary old house, Ghost is a memory of a vanished space, complete with touching archaeological imprints of a fireplace, window and door in its frozen, impenetrable surface. From casting Ghost, Whiteread went on to the next step, casting the interior of an entire vacated family home for her 1993 modern masterpiece, House. It stood like a grey concrete revenant on a London green until the council bulldozed it.
In the pandemic, Whiteread has created two alarming, utterly engrossing sculptures that revisit her first hauntings. These deathly white entities have titles that summon up Ghost and then some. They’re called Poltergeist and Doppelgänger. Not just supernatural entities but nasty ones: active, not passive. Where Ghost, owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, simply stands there refusing access or comment, these haunted huts reach out with branch-like fingers to clutch at you.
