Rachel Whiteread Symposium, Part 3: A Conversation with Lynne Cooke and Cristina Iglesias

Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, and Cristina Iglesias, artist Artist Rachel Whiteread has made casts and drawings for more than 30 years in an effort to define the space between positives and negatives, public and private, manufactured and hand-made objects—always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power. At the National Gallery of Art, an unprecedented and comprehensive survey exhibition of Whiteread’s celebrated career introduces a new generation of audiences to her work, which addresses how we live. Through sculptures and site-specific installations both massive and cryptic, artist Cristina Iglesias plunges viewers of her work into an unfamiliar world that seems to predate—and may outlast—recorded time. Her choice of materials troubles the difference between natural and manufactured environments, as do her choices for display; Iglesias installs sculptures made of cement, fibers, or metal in places from world-class museums to the ocean’s bottom. Lynne Cooke joins Iglesias in conversation at the symposium on October 26, 2018, held in conjunction with the Rachel Whiteread exhibition, to discuss intersections between Iglesias’s and Whiteread’s practices and how Iglesias’s sculptures envision a world existing after humans.