Rachel Whiteread
Ghost, 1990

You're looking at Rachel Whiteread's Ghost from 1990, a breakthrough work in which the artist creates a positive from a negative. Whiteread has made casts of the interior walls of a Victorian parlor and presents the air space–the void of the parlor–almost as a solid volume, complete with detailed impressions of everything the air in that room pressed up against. Walk around the sculpture. You'll encounter the impression left by a fireplace complete with soot, a sash window surrounded by molding, a doorknob and keyholes, and finally the flat plane of a solid wall. You'll notice crown molding around the top of the sculpture, and about a foot down from that, the impression of the picture rails. The skirting boards around the base make the work seem like it's set on a pedestal, like a traditional sculpture.

Whiteread has said of this sculpture that she was trying to "mummify the air in the room" hence the title Ghost. The piece accordingly conjures up death and remembrance, and even has a mausoleum-like effect. Yet it's inherently a positive form made of immaterial space, both a living space and a shelter for the dead. In fact opposites like these conjoin to make Ghost the powerful work that it is: a work simultaneously about presence and absence, interior and exterior, concision and complexity. Ghost is also a work about place: it resonates with the architecture of the East Building and the neoclassical silhouette of the West Building seen through the windows just beyond it.