Good drawing teachers encourage their students to conjure up what isn’t there. Instead of training the aspiring artists in their classes to delineate solids, they help them to develop a heightened awareness of the often ignored negative spaces between things, urging concentration on evoking unseen voids and implied volumes. It’s not easy to create expressive drawings of invisible entities. It’s difficult to take as a starting point a subject that cannot be studied directly or even imagined but must instead be deduced from the elements that surround it. It’s hard, that is to say, to make the unseen visible. Yet without this kind of challenge, students usually achieve nothing more than mere depictions—uninspired renderings, unworthy of being called drawings.

When Whiteread is at her best, she not only sharpens our perceptions but also surprises us.

It’s tempting to think that Rachel Whiteread had an excellent drawing instructor, someone who made the idea of bringing to the fore the unnoticed, the taken-for-granted, and the unseen seem irresistible. Whatever the initial motivation, Whiteread has spent the last thirty years asking us to pay attention to the empty spaces contained, tightly or casually, by the everyday objects among which we spend our lives. She has turned these absences into tangible solids that reveal the mysteries of hidden places as forthright exterior events: the interior of a numbingly modest Victorian house, the spaces embraced by the legs of a chair, the athletic trajectory of a staircase. At least, that’s what