Rachel Whiteread, one of the leading contemporary sculptors, is best known for her Minimalist casts of objects, furniture, and architectural spaces that are at once personal, monumental, and public, evoking themes of absence and memory. Although she is often associated with the Young British Artists, Whiteread's work is more closely aligned with artists such as Bruce Nauman, whose work A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965—68) was a profound influence on the younger artist.

The exploration of the overlooked aspects of negative space is an ever-present theme in many of her most notable works, such as House (1993), for which she created a large-scale, site-specific plaster cast of the interior of a condemned East London flat. Similarly, her Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, also known as the Nameless Library (2000), is constructed of casts of unknown books whose spines face inward. Whiteread's use of space, from the large-scale and public to the small-scale and intimate, creates a new relationship between history and time as she situates her work, both physically and thematically, among the everyday and the habitual.

In 1993, Whiteread became the first woman to win the prestigious Turner Prize. She has had solo exhibitions at acclaimed institutions such as Kunsthalle Basel, the Reina Sofia, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Deutsche Guggenheim. She represented Great Britain at the 1997 Venice Biennale.