Known for her public art projects, Rachel Whiteread is dedicated in her words to bringing "forgotten space into the world" (Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg). In Vienna, Austria, she completed a 24 by 33 foot memorial to Holocaust victims titled "The Nameless Library." Few of her works have human figures, but their presence and especially their absence is usually suggested.

Rachel Whiteread was born in 1963 and studied sculpture at the Slade School in the mid-80s under Antony Gormley. Whiteread uses a variety of materials including plaster, polystyrene and steel. Typically her work casts an area which has its form prescribed by everyday objects, for example tables or baths, and defines them exactly by the object surrounding them.

The public sculpture "House," is a cast of the inside of a three story Victorian terraced house in East London, and it won Rachel Whiteread the Turner Prize in 1993. House stood alone as a symbol of survival, as all the other houses in Grove Road had already been knocked down to make way for redevelopment.

Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/news_comment/artistsinprofile/whiteread.shtml

Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain's leading contemporary sculptors. Born in London in 1963, she studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. She shot to public attention in 1993 with her sculpture, "House," a life-sized replica of the interior of a condemned terraced house in London's East End which provoked intense public debate until it was eventually demolished in 1994.

Over the last decade she has developed a significant international reputation, creating major public works in both Europe and the United States. Her winning proposal for the Holocaust memorial at the Judenplatz in Vienna was one of the most prestigious sculptural commissions in Europe in the 1990s. This piece involved placing the cast interior of a library, including imprints from the books on their shelves, into the centre of the square. It was unveiled in October 2000.

She represented the UK at the 1997 Venice Biennale and created "Monument" for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2001. Her "Water Tower" (1998) was reinstalled on the roof of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

She lives and works in London and her work is represented in many private and public collections worldwide.