Turner Prize
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize is awarded annually to the ‘most outstanding contribution’ to British art that took place in the last year.
Biography
Born
1963
Nationality
English
Birth place
London
Whiteread was born in London. In 1988 she began making casts of the space in and around domestic objects, such as under a bed. These casts produced a ghostly world in negative form, evoking the history of the objects. In 1993 she made a concrete cast of an entire house in the east end of London. Like all of Whiteread's casts, the house was a monument to memory and mortality. It was demolished in 1994 amid controversy. Whiteread won the Turner Prize in 1993 and in 1997 became the first British woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Glossary terms
Young British Artists
A group of conceptual British artists, mainly born in the 1960s, first gathered together by Damien Hirst in 1988 to take part in an exhibition called Freeze. The phenomenon is also known as ‘Britart’.