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Exhibition Spotlight: Emotion in Window to Wall: Art from Architecture

February 13, 2018

Rachel Whiteread (British, born 1963). Doorway I, 2010. Resin, 80 3/8 x 29 3/4 x 3 inches (204.2 x 75.6 x 7.7 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Bequest of Arthur B. Michael, by exchange and Gift of Mrs. Georgia M. G. Forman, by exchange, 2011 (2011:30). © 2010 Rachel Whiteread, Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

The exhibition Window to Wall: Art from Architecture surveys the ways in which artists have turned their attention—and ours—to architecture through a focus on structure and surface as well as the buildings’ emotional and political resonances.

For some artists, including Rachel Whiteread, architecture is less about form than feeling: their works underscore how a building and its interior space can define our inner lives.

Since the early 1990s, Whiteread has made sculptures from casts of various objects designated obsolete and destroyed in the name of progress, including furniture, staircases, water towers, and even an entire house. Uselessly propped up against the wall, Doorway I may remind us of a collapsing structure and, more broadly, of all the homes we’ve lost or left behind. It insists that the architectural elements that shape our lives—including even those as humble as a nondescript door—can be conduits of personal and cultural memory.