In Untitled (2023), Whiteread extends her recent inquiries into materiality and light. Built from papier-mâché and covered in copper leaf, the work is anchored within a wooden frame, producing a surface that is at once muted and luminous. Its horizontally layered structure positions the piece between painting and relief, as though capturing the moment when light lingers upon matter.
Whiteread has long been concerned with the “reverse side of space”—the overlooked seams, shadows, and intervals that define absence as much as presence. Here, the reflective copper draws the viewer’s gaze back and forth between surface and depth, as if contemplating the folding of time itself. The work’s sense of “quiet materiality” echoes her earlier castings of negative space, yet now engages lighter materials to explore a “fleeting kind of eternity,” giving warmth and texture to emptiness.
This piece marks a significant development in Whiteread’s ongoing reconsideration of “the memory of matter” and “the light of surfaces” through lightweight, handmade materials. As she noted in her Internal Objects exhibition, she seeks to let the work embody a kind of “breathing fragility.” In this piece, the warm glow of copper leaf contrasts with the humble fibers of papier-mâché, symbolizing the ways in which time lies dormant within material and quietly regenerates.