Rachel Whiteread: Ghost / Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation of Christ

Ghost is a technically complex and conceptually challenging sculpture by the contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread. To create Ghost, Whiteread made castings of the walls, fixtures, and features of an actual room. She then assembled these units into a sculpture of the room in reverse. To help us better understand Whiteread’s treatment of volume, mass, and space, we can compare Ghost with Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ. Piero was an Italian Renaissance painter, who was an innovator in the development of perspective. In his painting, Piero depicted bodies as sculptural masses positioned within volumes of space. In Ghost, Whiteread transformed a volume of space into a sculptural mass.