Lost Memories and Relics of Urban Living
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Night Drawing), 2018. Gouache and ink on papier-mâché, 26 x 25 3/16 x 1 9/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
Housed above a pub in East London, The Approach’s gallery space is currently a haunted house of sorts. Hold Still brings together sculptural works of Heidi Bucher, Hana Miletić, and Rachel Whiteread, harnessing the fleeting and transitory state of a half-forgotten memory.
Whiteread’s works engage with mundane, urban materials and re-examine them. The first piece encountered in the annex of the gallery, Untitled (Night Drawing) (2018), is a papier-mâché sculpture that imitates a slab of asphalt. Whiteread’s pieces are lived in, touched, used—a piece of asphalt that appears in the gallery could have been hauled off the street. Whiteread’s papier-mâché also takes form in fragments of steel roofs and gates, prompting a trompe l’oeil: I recognize, but you are not that which I see.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Blue Notes) I, 2022. Resin and steel, 37 3/8 x 25 9/16 x 3 3/8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
A blank, glassy slab sits quaintly further into the gallery. Moving closer to one’s own reflection, the viewer sees a billboard preserved behind the glass in Whiteread’s Untitled (Blue Notes) I (2022). Unlike boards that wreathe the walls of schools and community centers, littered with colorful volunteering opportunities, job adverts, and event flyers, Whiteread’s ephemera in this alternate space are blank. Blank pages, unmarked envelopes, pure white poster sheets decorate the board—memories faded away from an object expected to be teeming with life.
The only piece that hangs separate from the wall is Miletić’s orange crocheted wool sculpture—another blank page. The crochet and wire imitate plastic netting, an unfamiliar sight when not embracing a tree or fencing off a construction zone. The sculpture stands on its own, nature taken out of the equation, and the material holds itself, bridging together the perceived and the visceral, drawing out the ephemerality of everyday urban spaces.
Hold Still, installation view. Hana Miletić, Materials, 2023. Crocheted textile (amber orange raw cord, carrot orange, organic linen, metal wire, orange organic silk, and pale orange organic wool), 70 7/8 x 14 15/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London.
Bucher’s latex sculptures are intimate, even sensual. Aptly called Skinnings, Bucher used gauze and latex to create imprints taken from her ancestral home; the finished works are fleshy, indexical remnants. Coffee-stain brown and murky amber, some still retain the crisscross tessellations of the hardwood floors from her father’s study. Bucher extends the lives of these spaces in her work, though it begs the question: how are they to continue living? Latex is an impermanent material—how will they last? Do they need to?
This haunted house is filled with haptic notions and textile memory. What is material, if not memory? The pieces echo each other, each solid yet fleeting. Bucher brushes mother-of-pearl over her skins, adding an iridescent sheen to the decaying latex: an act of love, to make what was once so precious beautiful in its ruin. To take a fragment of homes and houses that held lives out of their context is to rewrite history, but highlighting the materiality of the rooms themselves makes them more than lived-in spaces—they are memories through which the mind may linger nostalgically and imagine the past. In these acts, the past becomes a generative, created force as well as a memory. What does an everyday item become when one turns it inside out, becomes its ghost, haunts it, and preserves it?
Heidi Bucher, Untitled, 1979. Latex, textile, and mother-of-pearl, 26 9/16 x 19 inches. Courtesy of the Estate of Heidi Bucher and The Approach, London.
Whiteread draws attention to the disposable material in outside spaces that becomes waste and clutter in urban life. These images become echoes, evoking the feeling of a life once lived, of yearning for that emotion again and mourning its absence. These sculptures scream for something lost—they are possessed.
The dialogue between the works incites the idea of a cultivated, possibly even falsified, collective memory. Bucher’s sculptures are drawn from lived spaces, whereas Whiteread’s are casts of industrial, harsh material, imbued with traces of the past. Miletić’s textile works combine the crafts associated with the home with the harsh plastics of human living and excess. Miletić, Whiteread, and Bucher manage to capture what is fleeting; their relics and imprints unearth hidden memories. Lost moments in time and shared memory become tangible in their sculptures. Time holds still, becoming visceral and immovable in a world bursting with wasteful impermanence and gutted memories.
Hold Still, installation view. Courtesy of The Approach, London.
Heidi Bucher, Hana Miletić, Rachel Whiteread: Hold Still is on view at The Approach from September 6 through October 10, 2025.
