Rachel Whiteread

A contemporary British artist whose specialty is casting the interiors of objects. That is, she will take something, usually something as large as a room or a house, and fill it with plaster, then remove the object, so that the interior space is revealed as a solid.

The results are extraordinarily compelling, and she is one of the most consistently respected of this generation of artists.

Her most famous piece was House, created from a house in the East End of London, the last of a row of houses scheduled for demolition. There was nothing left but grass blending into a park, and this white, more or less cubical, installation. It attracted huge numbers of visitors to this rather run-down area. You could see colours from the walls, strange imprints gradually identifiable as the old plumbing system, beginnings of staircases that went nowhere. The local council insisted it was going to be demolished in due course, as agreed; the art world raised an outcry, and in this case lost. It is gone.

She has also been in the Turner Prize competition (they displayed casts of smaller things in the Tate, but House was the real attraction); she has designed the Holocaust memorial in Vienna; and she filled the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square by inverting a cast of the plinth on it.

Ms. Whiteread was also the subject of a rather bizarre instance of socioeconomic hacking done by The KLF.

In 1993, the artists formerly known as the KLF jammed pop culture's radar, not by releasing music but by commenting on the art world. First, a series of newspaper adverts commanded the world to "Abandon All Art Now." Cauty and Drummond, thinly veiled as The K-Foundation, announced that they would award a prize of £40,000 to the worst work of art that year. Winner Rachel Whiteread (who had also won England's Turner Prize) refused the award, prompting a ceremony in which the K-Foundation vowed to burn the prize money. Whiteread accepted the award just seconds before the bills were torched, and donated the money to charity.