Dame Rachel Whiteread DBE (born 20 April 1963) is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts.

Among her most renowned works are House, a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house; the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, resembling the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards; and Untitled Monument, her resin sculpture for the empty fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square.

From 1985 to 1987 she studied sculpture at Slade School of Art, University College, London, where she was taught by Phyllida Barlow, graduating with an MA in 1987.

[10][11] Many of Whiteread's works are casts of ordinary domestic objects and, in numerous cases, their so-called negative space.

For example, she is known for making solid casts of the open space in and around pieces of furniture such as tables and chairs, architectural details and even entire rooms and buildings.

[20] According to the National Gallery, "She has worked on every scale, defining the space between positives and negatives, public and private, and manufactured and handmade objects, always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power.

The critical response included: "like a field of large glace sweets, it is her most spectacular, and benign installation to date [...] Monuments to domesticity, they are like solidified jellies, opalescent ice-cubes, or bars of soap – lavender, rose, spearmint, lilac.

"[27] In 1998, Whiteread made Water Tower as part of a grant for New York City's Public Art Fund.

The piece, which is 12' 2" and 9' in diameter, was a translucent resin cast of a water tower installed on a rooftop in New York City's SoHo district.

[28] It has been called "an extremely beautiful object, which changes colour with the sky, and also a very appropriate one, celebrating one of the most idiosyncratic and charming features of the New York skyline.

With the condition that this memorial could not be figurative and needed to represent all 65,000 lives and the camps they were executed at, Rachel Whiteread was chosen out of ten artists to create this monument.

The inability to read these books alludes to the lost lives of the 65,000 Austrian Jews whose stories are unable to be told leaving the viewer with a sense of loss and absence.

This monument also questions the architectural concepts of interior and exterior as the building surrounding the square form walls, and the streets leading into it like doorways.

[32] The work was produced in two halves, and surface blisters of the cast were repaired by picking them off and filling the small craters with a syringe of resin.

[33] Unusually for a public work, she raised funds for the piece herself by selling maquettes (small preparatory models); this was no small gesture with the mold alone costing over £100,000 and the total cost estimated at £225,000[34] The critical response included: "This dazzling anti-monument monument looks like a glass coffin, but its watery transparency relates to the large fountain that dominates the Trafalgar plaza.

"[35] "It's a simple trick, but an effective one, and the associations it conjures – heaviness and lightness, earth and heaven, death and life – are thought-provoking and manifold [...] Whiteread's Monument, as light and gleaming as the plinth is dark and squat, is the only one of the four commissioned pieces to allude directly to the plinth's defining emptiness.

In spring 2004, she was offered the annual Unilever series commission to produce a piece for Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall, delaying acceptance for five to six months until she was confident she could conceive of a work to fill the space.

She cited the end scenes of both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Citizen Kane as visual precursors; she also spoke of the death of her mother and a period of upheaval which involved packing and moving comparable boxes.

[36] It is also thought that her recent trip to the Arctic is an inspiration, although critics counter that white is merely the colour the polyethylene comes in, and it would have added significantly to the expense to dye them.

"[37] "Everything feels surprisingly domestic in scale, the intimidating vistas of the Turbine Hall shrunk down to irregular paths and byways.

From atop the walkway, it looks like a storage depot that is steadily losing the plot; from inside, as you thread your way between the mounds of blocks, it feels more like an icy maze.

"[38] "This is another example of meritless gigantism that could be anywhere, and is the least successful of the gallery's six attempts to exploit its most unsympathetic space,"[39] "[looks] like a random pile of giant sugar cubes [...] Luckily, the £400,000 sponsored work is recyclable.

[46] With this work, Whiteread wanted to "blur the notion of space even further by allowing the booming nature of the park to and hide the installation."

In 2023, Whiteread created a 31 feet tall Christmas tree covered by 102 circular neon white hoops for Carlos Place outside The Connaught hotel in London's Mayfair district which commissioned the piece.