Rachel Whiteread in front of Nissen Hut, one of her many concrete sculptures.
Like many other members of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Rachel Whiteread is highly controversial, and her work is both widely praised and ridiculed. Best-known for her large casts of the negative spaces of everyday objects, Whiteread has successfully built up a reputation for herself over the past three decades, and she is now considered a prominent contemporary British artist.
Despite the differing opinions her work engenders, Rachel Whiteread remains steadily popular in today’s market. Though she is primarily a sculptress, prints still account for 19% of her work sold at auction, with the majority of them fetching between £1,000 and £5,000.
Below is a list of Rachel Whiteread’s five most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a Rachel Whiteread print and would like to find out more about how much it might be worth, or how to sell it, contact Mark Littler today.
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Demolished
Rachel Whiteread has an enduring fascination with the demolition of buildings, particularly residential properties. In 1993, she was the first woman to win the Turner Prize for House, a vast concrete cast of a condemned Victorian property in London’s East End. Her creation was destroyed the following year after causing much controversy; the Demolished screenprints of 1996 can be considered both a reaction to this, and an extension of Whiteread’s interest in the demolition of property in less-affluent areas of London.
Demolished was actually Rachel Whiteread’s first portfolio of prints, and each of the 12 prints records the knocking down of tower blocks in three separate housing estates in Hackney (East London) between 1993 and 1995. According to Whiteread, the screenprints captured “something that is going to be completely forgotten… the detritus of our culture.” The prints are among Whiteread’s most popular in today’s market, accounting for six out of her 10 most expensive prints sold at auction. This particular set of prints reached £8,000 when it was sold by Sotheby’s in February 2004.
Demolished sold by Sotheby’s in 2004
12 Objects, 12 Etchings
Rachel Whiteread has said she’s always been drawn to so-called ‘found’ objects and materials, stating: “I’ve always picked things up. I’m a magpie.” Some of these things find their way into her studio; in her own words, “I’ve always got a studio full of crap, and I play around with things.”
As part of an exhibition of her drawings at Tate Britain in 2009, Whiteread also decided to display a collection of objects she’d acquired over the years which usually reside in her studio to provide her with inspiration. The artist subsequently had these items photographed, then she chose 12 of her favourite images and had them made into photogravure etchings. The objects range from the mundane (a piece of string) to the unusual (a life-size model of a brain) to the outright bizarre (a bronze cast of Whiteread’s ear). 12 Objects, 12 Etchings gives a glimpse into Whiteread’s artistic practice and was sold by Phillips in January 2020 for £8,000.
12 Objects, 12 Etchings sold by Phillips in 2020
Water Tower Project
In June 1998, Rachel Whiteread installed a giant 4½-ton sculpture on a rooftop in Manhattan; it was a resin cast of the interior of a cedar wood water tower, which the artist less than modestly described as a “jewel in the Manhattan skyline.”
The resin medium of the piece meant it changed as the light shifted, glowing like a beacon or becoming near-invisible, depending on the type of day and the strength of the sunlight. A layer of acrylic resin was applied to the surface of the 1998 screenprints in order to echo the light-refracting properties of the sculpture. The original resin water tank is now held in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but the prints executed in the same year remain among Whiteread’s most popular at auction; this particular one was sold by Phillips in July 2018 for £7,185.
Water Tower Project sold by Phillips in 2018
50 Spaces
In 1995, Rachel Whiteread created One Hundred Spaces, an installation piece consisting of 100 coloured resin casts of the underside of chairs. The project fed into Whiteread’s interest in negative spaces, and spaces in daily life which are usually overlooked.
The 50 Spaces screenprints are a continuation of that installation, though they were created 26 years later, in 2021, when Whiteread was invited (along with seven other leading artists) to create a print in celebration of the Tate Modern’s 21st anniversary. 50 Spaces was sold by Forum Auction in February 2023 for £1,400.
50 Spaces sold by Forum Auctions in 2023
Untitled (Tiles)
Rachel Whiteread has stated prints have “always been something I’m interested in – the two-dimension aspect of what I do. It’s often the way I think, and a sort of mindful reaction to doing the other more heavy-duty work of casting and sculpting.”
Untitled (Tiles) is a set of lithographs created by Whiteread in support of the Tate, and on the occasion of an exhibition of her work held in the gallery between September 2017 and January 2018. The entire edition exudes Whiteread’s usual monochrome tones and interest in “poetic… clean lines”, and this particular print was sold by Bonhams in October 2020 for £1,400.
Untitled (Tiles) sold by Bonham’s in 2020
