ART: Rachel Whiteread at Nelson-Freeman

Over the past 20 years, through redefining traditions of Minimal and Conceptual art, Turner-prize-winning UK artist Rachel Whiteread has created an influential body of sculpture which explores the themes of absence and memory through the manipulation of architecture and space. Using industrial materials such as plaster, resin, and rubber, she often creates casts that reproduce the interior spaces of familiar objects, revealing unfamiliar negative spaces in which emptiness takes on a material presence and what was once invisible acquires a palpable shape. For her first exhibition at Galerie Nelson-Freeman in Paris, Rachel Whiteread presents a series of sculptural works in which intimately-scaled casts are grouped into still lifes; the familiar and ordinary objects of the kitchen cupboard and bathroom cabinet (cardboard tubes, food and medicine packages, fragments of packing materials) recombined into their own new landscape. New in these works is a strong presence of color, which explores a wide range of subtlety. Whiteread’s works on paper are also central to her work – according to the artist, “My drawings act as a diary of my work”- and while rarely exhibited in the past, this show is one of the first exhibitions to show the artist’s sculpture and drawings together.
Until 13 Nov.
Galerie Nelson-Freeman, 59 rue Quincampoix, 4th. Tue-Sat, 11am-7pm (closed bw 1&2pm).  www.galerienelsonfreeman.com/