A YBA who came of age

By Eve Watling

“Please don’t call it a retrospective,” Rachel Whiteread has said of the exhibition tracking her 30-year art career, which has opened at Tate Britain. “I can only think about it if I call it a ‘survey’.” This geographical and architectural term avoids the death-knell of “retrospective” and feels suitable for a body of work that maps the artist’s domestic landscape.

The exhibition, in the cavernous Duveen galleries, draws a thread from her first solo exhibition in 1988 to her thin papier-mâché casts from this year. Whiteread specialises in using plaster or resin to capture a missing object or the spaces in between things; she describes herself as “mummifying the air in a room.”