In her castings from common objects, British sculptor Rachel Whiteread proposes a reverence for the everyday. Among her unique monumentalizations are mattresses, furniture, and bathtubs. To greater or lesser degrees, these sculptures resemble their household counterparts yet, as art, they have a different status. First of all, they are nonfunctional; they exist to be seen. In looking at them, routines are dislocated; our relationship with the object on view may become more self-conscious or assume a fresh significance.
In Untitled (Yellow Bath), cast from an old tub, a gentle hollow familiar to all bathers makes a concave protective subject. Site of respite, dreams, and cleansing, the tub, for all its sculptural bulk, exudes intimacy. Its translucency simultaneously heightens and denies the work's tactility: when lighted, it glows but repels touch. As the negative of a worn object, Whiteread's cast shows the inverse of a familiar surface as well as a geometrized block of surrounding space.
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