The Rachel Whiteread Exhibition

Remember her? The artist who cast the whole of a terraced house in the East End of London, and won the Turner Prize in 1993? The Tate Britain gave her an exhibition which I visited this week. You might think 'how can they fit any of her work into the Tate?' and 'is it going to be a repetitive series of concrete blocks?' like I did, but it was much better than that.

To start with, her Untitled (one hundred spaces) 1995 is laid in your path in the Dunveen Galleries before you even get to the exhibition. The space is plain and high, so these hundred coloured resin casts of the undersides of chairs have an almost religious stillness to them. And you can't help thinking about how long it must have taken her to make them.

The next room is inhabited by her choices from the Tate Britain collection, including a sensual Barbara Hepworth in verdigris bronze, and a funny/shocking set up from Sarah Lucas. Then a museum case filled with little things and sketchbook pages from Rachel Whiteread's studio. The inside of a glove, sketchy drawings of mould designs and sewn felt shapes and casts of odd objects. And only then do you get into the exhibition room.

This room is large and rectangular with a prominent concrete ceiling and good lighting. There are casts of mattresses, window casements, hot water bottles, light switches, staircases and loo rolls, mainly in concrete or resin. There is something about the very familiarity of these objects which makes a cast of the inside space faintly disturbing. You can't quite get your head round how the space works. It's an impressively simple way to engage the visual part of my brain in examining itself. Or in other words, to see mundane things differently.

I didn't include books in that list of mundane things she has cast, because I want to talk about the holocaust memorial she made for a city in Germany separately. The memorial itself remains in the middle of a small square there, but the cast was there at the Tate. At first I was surprised about how small it was. It was the size of three rows of bookshelves in a library. This friendly size made it immediately both easy to read, and intimate. And then the details of the books drew me in. Again, the sheer woman-hours that must have gone into casting the page sides of each book was breathtaking. Each one was unique, and detailed, and was an eloquent way of reminding us of the waste of unique humans that was being commemorated. I was moved.

So yes, it was a load of cast negative spaces in concrete or resin. But no, it wasn't boring at all.