Rachel Whiteread & Robert Burns' Breakfast Table

28 July - 9 August 2007

Rachel Whiteread (b.1963) is internationally renowned as one of the greatest British artists of her generation. Casting familiar objects in raw materials such as plaster, rubber, concrete and resin, she transforms them into monuments to absent owners, and the traces of their anonymous lives. Whiteread is still perhaps best known in the UK for 'House', a concrete cast of an entire Victorian Terrace in London's East End that she completed in 1993 and which was controversially demolished shortly after. By 'turning the world inside out' through her casting process, Whiteread's objects become at once familiar and strange, both unnervingly intimate and quietly neutral.

 

Poet Robert 'Rabbie'? Burns (1759 - 1796) is widely held to be one of the greatest of literary figures in Scotland and his life and work is still celebrated every year on 25th January with Burns Night, at which is traditionally recited his "Address to a Haggis". Poems and songs for which Burns remains well known today include 'Auld Lang Syne'?, 'To a Mouse' and 'A Man's a Man for A' That'?.

 

This exhibition presented a recent sculpture chosen from Whiteread's own collection and a group of new works on paper, alongside an object with it's own very specific history: Robert Burn's breakfast table.