Untitled (Freestanding Bed)

This artist's work shares a large-scale minimalist aesthetic which is overlaid - or undermined - by a quirky humour or discreet domestic history. Whiteread's early works showed an interest in absence, in the shadow of things. She made sculpture by taking casts of the area around objects, giving solid form to space and allowing us to rediscover familiar domestic furniture in its negative. Her more recent work allowed human life to enter into her art work more decisively. She has made much of the mattress as a subject and an object, and has used its life history to add meaning to her works. This bed, though monumental, iconic and made of a hard material, looks soft, vulnerable, ready to sustain further wear and tear despite having already absorbed the marks of experience.