As they are all about my age, I feel woefully inadequate when faced with a body of work as impressive as Whiteread's. Although her famous House is not extant, having been torn down in what might be judged as the worst planning mistake a council ever made, there is more than enough here to show why she was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993.
She's all about space, the nothing places and things that we don't notice, like the undersides of the hundred chairs cast in coloured resin in the main hall. And the things that will never be, like the books not written by Holocaust victims in her memorial to them in Vienna, which I have also seen. Here there are similar book shelves with books placed spine in.
Of all her castings, doors, mattresses, staircases, my favourites were the tiny and domestic. Her hot water bottles in various media are some of her earlier pieces, and there is a whole case of them to rekindle my interest. But this is also work of scale and wonder. Just how did she do that?
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