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Rachel Whiteread, beyond sculpture

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Rachel Whiteread. Ah, yes, the British sculptor known for casting the interior of a Victorian living room and the inside of an entire multi-story house.

She’s an artist who thinks big in public projects and those are her signature works, the ones that get international attention. But another side of her artistic persona is revealed in “Rachel Whiteread Drawings,” the intriguing new exhibition at the Hammer Museum. The show of 155 works on paper — accompanied by eight sculptures and a vitrine of small objects she has made or collected — illuminates a relatively private body of work that she describes as a sort of diary.

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Fashioned of an odd assortment of materials — ink, resin, crayon, correction fluid, silver leaf and collage, often on graph paper — the drawings are related to her sculptures. But they are not preparatory tools that deal with processes of construction.

“Drawing is something I do to worry through a proposal and think about how to do it,” she says. “It’s not about thinking what the thing will look like.”

To read the full story in Sunday’s Arts & Books section, click here.

— Suzanne Muchnic

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