Synopses & Reviews
This elegant volume accompanies the first museum survey of drawings by Rachel Whiteread, tracing her career from the late 1980s to the present. While Whiteread's public works such as House, the monumental cast of a nineteenth-century terraced house in the East End of London that earned her the Turner Prize, Water Tower, which graced the skyline of downtown Germany, and Untitled Monument in Trafalgar Square are renowned, her works on paper have remained largely unknown to the general public. This book explores Whiteread's draftsmanship, a lesser-known yet fundamentally important aspect of the artist's creative process. My drawings are a diary of my work, Whiteread explains, and like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to laboured reflections. This book sheds light on the distinctive characteristics of her works on paper, such as their variegated textures, the subtle nuances of tone over colored graph paper, and the play of imagery in collaged constructions. It presents exquisite reproductions of Whiteread s drawings, with essays by Allegra Pesenti and Ann Gallagher. A visual essay by Whiteread is a distinguishing feature of the volume, reflecting an installation of found and made objects gathered from various sources. Taken as a parallel to her sculpture or seen as a further dimension of her art, her drawings constitute a significant and defined area of Whiteread s remarkable career, one that deserves close attention and celebration.
Synopsis
This publication is the first to focus exclusively on the art technique known as
frottage, discussing its roots in Surrealism and contemporary practitioners.
Synopsis
This fascinating publicationand#160;sheds light on a medium that combines the qualities of drawing with those of sculpture, printmaking, and painting, and is the first to focus exclusively on the art technique known as frottage, derived from the French word frotter, meaning andldquo;to rub.andrdquo; Over 100 pieces, ranging from contemporary conceptual works to rubbings recording tombs and inscriptions, are assembled and sumptuously reproduced in color. More than 50 artists--including the famous, like Max Ernst, inventor of the term andldquo;frottage,andquot; and theand#160;relatively unknown--are presented. Four thematic sections explore different aspects of frottage: its roots in Surrealism and the practice of automatic drawing; the notion of trace, of either a place or an idea left behind in a rubbing; the andldquo;apparitionsandrdquo; or ghostlike attributes that can appear on the surface of an artwork; and the associations between rubbings, death, and memory. and#160;
About the Author
Allegra Pesenti is a drawings specialist and curator at large for the Menil Drawing Institute, The Menil Collection.