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Art review Beautiful blight as Whiteread meets the pastoral

The Guardian

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May 30, 2025

I feel like I've stumbled into a 1970s album cover for the Who or Led Zeppelin that juxtaposes nature and post-industrial malaise.

- Jonathan Jones

Art review Beautiful blight as Whiteread meets the pastoral

Emerging from woodlands on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, you see a massive concrete cast of a staircase in a lush green field – a spectacular, surreal collision of urban grit and English pastoral. This is Rachel Whiteread's Down and Up, a brutal intruder in the landscape.

Leafy woods and glorious views – I contemplated Down and Up through a veil of rain but was assured you can see down to the sea on a sunny day – create a dramatic setting for her stark sepulchres.

In a forest clearing stands another work, Untitled (Pair) – two bone-white rectangular slabs that look like death. That's no accident, for their shallow concave tops were cast from mortuary tables. Alone with this monument, the tall trees standing guard around me, I don't so much ponder mortality as silently scream.

House, the famous, lost masterpiece that won Whiteread the 1993 Turner prize, also once stood in the open air, as ungainly and insistent against an east London sky as these remorseless objects look in a much more tranquil context. It was demolished in a culture war that's forgotten now, but Whiteread is no sensationalist.

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