Rachel Whiteread was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II.
Rachel Whiteread in her 2013 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on Britannia Street. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
Rachel Whiteread, one of the Young British Artists whose career began blossoming in the late 1980s along with colleagues like Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, and Damien Hirst, has received one of the U.K’s highest honors: she has been made a Dame in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday List.
Whiteread, known for signature intervention of making tangible the intangible by casting physical objects from negative spaces, has had a prolific and pioneering career, and this honor is far from her first. In 1993 she was the first woman to win the Turner Prize; in 1997 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale; and in 2017 she received the International Medal of Arts from the U.S. State Department. She has alo been widely celebrated for such public commissions as her in 2001 Trafalgar Square fourth plinth commission in London and her Judenplatz holocaust memorial in Vienna, which was unveiled in 2000.
Other artists and art world figures were also awarded high titles in this year’s list, which was unveiled on Friday. Along with Whiteread, painter Glenn Brown and photographer Terry O’Neill were awarded Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). Ceramicist Kate Malone and printmaker John Mackechnie were awarded Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) titles, and the curator of the 2019 Venice Biennale’s central exhibition, Ralph Rugoff, and curator Roger Malbert received Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) titles.
